#and then at community college i paid tuition to learn absolutely nothing | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

okay-victoria · 3 years ago

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Random Personal Rant

For anyone somehow here not from the original thread, this started off me getting asked what finishing school is and me getting shit off my chest that is only mildly relevant about how I could both be of the social class that gets sent to finishing school and grows up on welfare.

With an understanding that in many parts of the world it wouldn't qualify as so, as far as the US goes, my dad is from what counts as a very old money family from Baltimore & Philadelphia. Both his siblings went to college and one now owns a major hedge fund, and his sister is married to a C-level executive at a huge conglomerate. His parents went to college. His grandparents went to college. All eight of his great grandparents went to college. My dad...did not go to college. He was not about that life, and while I don't mean it as an insult, when I say his primary occupation until I was ~5 was a drummer in a mediocre band I mean that he opened for a lot of great acts, and if you lived in the Boston to Atlanta area in the 80s you may have heard him play, but he was never a huge national name. But he wasn't an amateur band playing for free at some random local gig either.

My mom grew up on a chicken farm in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania but also completely rejected her heritage and became a model, sort of like my father, of mediocre status. Not Giselle Bundchen, but had national contracts and if you have a Graco ad/box from 1990-1993 you might see both me and her on it. They met because my mom's friends placed bets, one each, on who could sleep with a member of their favorite local band first and my mom picked my dad and...my mom was actually supposed to go be a model in Tokyo and found out she was pregnant with me and couldn't go 😂

So, after my parents had two kids back to back with a third on the way and determined they needed lifestyles more in line with having three children, they became much poorer than they originally were because my mom stopped working and my dad, with a barely-passed-high-school education but needing a true "day job" worked day labor in construction. My dad's father was too proud to give us money/help if my dad didn't beg for it; despite having eventually four young children my dad never did so we ended up on all the state assistance programs one could imagine. My grandma jokes that dinners at my parents house were BYOC - bring your own chair, because we didn't own any.

My mother and paternal grandmother had no such pride issues and I live in eternal gratitude that my welfare childhood was not as crappy as it should have been because my grandmother would have my mom accompany her on grocery runs and buy us food without my father or grandfather knowing, and every Christmas and birthday my grandparents/godparents could give us the one big ticket gift all the kids wanted that year. But, on the other side, I once got stung by a bee inside my mouth because my brother threw a hairbrush through a cracked window at me and broke it and we couldn't afford to fix it for about two years and a hornet got in one day and rested himself in my coke can (my parents were the very American type that fed me coca-cola in baby bottles at age 8 when I was jealous of my younger siblings lol).

It is hard not to believe in "toxic masculinity" when two men warring over dumbass pride issues would rather their children/grandchildren go without food than suck it up and decide 'help' isn't the worst word in the English language, and you know you've only been saved by two women who came from totally different backgrounds and entirely disapproved of each other but reached out the hand to shake when it came down to toddlers getting the short end of the don't-bend-the-knee stick. It wasn't that either of the men were bad people, I loved them both and got along great with both, but on a societal level I feel they were socialized in a very fucked up way if that was the end result, as both claimed "male pride" in these instances [my dad took multiple thousands of dollars I'd saved from working during college from me during the 2008-2010 financial crisis and didn't tell me and that was the reason I was given for why I hadn't been informed/asked, because it would be too emotionally difficult for an adult man to ask a young woman. My graduation present was them repaying me 1/3 of the money they'd taken from me without asking because I'd like, trusted them when it had been in a joint account that was a holdover from when I was <18 and couldn't have my own bank account].

While in some ways my parents on the surface achieved the American dream of going from nothing to a bunch of money, the real factor in play was that my dad's father was the bank. My parents had no credit and couldn't get real loans. My dad worked construction and during the two major periods that flipping houses was very lucrative, he never had to get an actual loan or pay actual interest, he just had to ask his father to pay out cash and then repay him at a flat 2% interest rate that didn't even accrue over time, just...whenever you are ready, repay the value of the loan + 2%. Because my father was doing something productive, in these instances, my grandfather was happy to pay, because it wasn't giving away money, it was loaning it. I had a very weird situation of mostly being poor but like also getting taken to the "big donors" events at the Kennedy Center and my grandparents regularly buying me a dress as a child worth more than my mom's wedding dress and also needing to pretend I fit in with these people.

And look. When I say "these people"...honestly, by and large, most wealthy people, whether inherited or not, are not the assholes you want to imagine. Most of them are extremely nice. Most of them are generous when it comes to the less fortunate who are in their personal sphere of being. Most of them are just really out of touch. The 100% kindest of all of them that I know once relayed to me that she thought people would be happier if once a year they did what she did...go to the airport with a purse packed full of absolute necessities, buy a one way ticket to the most appealing destination on the flight board, buy your clothes and book your accommodations after you'd arrived, and come back after you felt you'd 'centered' yourself. She didn't understand why there were so many unhappy people who weren't taking this very obvious route to being happier. I didn't quite know how to explain that saying "most" people couldn't afford to do that either financially or from a job/career angle didn't even cover it, as "most" sounds like 70% instead of 99.7%.

I was both my parents eldest son and eldest daughter in the worst combination possible. I was the eldest son because I was the most stereotypically male of all my siblings, in everything from desire to physically fight the battles I was given to dislike of shopping/fashion to lack of emotional connection to my relationships, so I can now fix your average household plumbing/drywall/electrical issue better than most "city" guys I interact with and remain less clingy to them in the process. I was also very much the oldest daughter from a responsibility perspective, I managed our household and from age 10 - 24 managed the finances of our family business, my mom almost died giving birth to my youngest brother after a ruptured uterus that should never have happened in the first place if we had adequate insurance to get her a non-emergency C-section (I was just past 9 years old at the time) and I was informally withdrawn from school for two years to take care of the family when she couldn't because there is no paid parental leave in the US and we got double-fucked by the medical industry because she got a bad "mesh" put in and then had to have a further surgery to repair that which we also had to pay for and didn't have the money to win a lawsuit over.

I don't know quite how to put this, but in the deepest fuck you of the universe, my rich-immigrant-ggggg grandfather's money led to him owning banks, insurance companies, etc, and the family cashed out in a big way when their ownership was bought by and merged with what is now Cigna, one of the biggest US healthcare insurers, and my nuclear family specifically got screwed by the American health insurance industry, but anyway, we were the people selected for that karmic comeuppance so if you want to feel schadenfreude at my expense, I'll allow it without begrudging the sentiment, my family might have fucked up your family’s life too, not just their own.

I got up twice a night to feed my brother because my dad had to sleep unmolested in my room to get to work and my mom was too weak to carry my brother or even hold him against her while she nursed so I had to hold him up to her. Adjusting to living in a city and hearing lots of random noises all the time was not easy when I'd had mom sound instincts from age 9.

I learned to drive the fall my youngest bro was born because my mom couldn't and I had to get my middle brother to preschool and go the grocery store on my own. While I hold absolutely no ill will towards my father or grandfather for this and given that about 1/3 of my paternal family either has an autism diagnosis or should, I fully feel the struggles they both went through to be communicated with, my father wouldn't ask for help, and my grandmother that lived 20 minutes away couldn't give enough help because my grandfather refused to do a single dish on his own as that was outside their "marriage contract" type agreement and she couldn't ever stay with us overnight when there wasn't a clearly-communicated need, so they let the burden fall on a 9 - 11 year old child and that really shaped a lot of my life in both good and bad ways. My youngest brother is 22, and we have only just climbed out of the medical debt his birth left us with between my dad's life insurance and my oldest brother and I paying for the extra cost of out-of-state college tuition.

The irony of all of this is that because my father died before his father, when my grandmother dies, my siblings and I will all inherit enough money (as a non-blood relative my mom, despite keeping her vows to part at death and not having remarried in eight years, is cut out entirely) to make this a non-issue, but my grandfather couldn't conscience spotting his unluckiest child some money in the end of days to pay for my youngest two brothers' education and take that worry off my father as he was dying. The day before he died I had to hold him down in bed to keep him from trying to climb in his truck to go to work because he was so anxious about trying to provide for us in spite of his father having fuck you money, because his father didn't think it was fair to the other siblings (who, at the time, still owned a major hedge fund and were married to a C-level executive of a huge conglomerate). A day and a half later I went back to my job because at the time I was then the sole provider for the family and didn't want to risk asking for the standard week's bereavement leave when I knew I was capable of showing up at work the next day and was fresh out of college so hadn't built up a reputation yet.

My father worked the day each of us was born, so I suppose it is only fair and he smiled at the choice. In spite of what it may seem, I gave a baller and very heartfelt speech at his funeral to all his rich friends that over and above everything, he'd taught us how to be happy with our own lives no matter what, and multiple of them emailed my mom in the aftermath to say they'd reassessed their relationship with their children in light of it, although...tbh I kind of doubt that lasted and they probably changed nothing 😅. The last good talk I had with him, two weeks before he died [his liver was going and it sent toxins to his brain that de-personed him after that and he no longer recognized me as his daughter, but as his sister], I reassured him that though we would all be sad he'd gone, we'd live on just fine without him because that's how he'd raised us, and according to my mom that was what gave him the final bit of peace he needed. Although honestly, I don't think I will ever see the strength in another human again that it took my grandmother to sit next to him and stroke his hand and tell him to close his eyes and imagine he was happy on a beach and die, for God's sake, because he was unaware and in pain and just prolonging it for our sake by then.

That type of obsession my grandfather had with assessing his children and grandchildren on the basis of economic productivity and a very black and white idea of "fair" is one you don't easily forget, I promise you. My hedge fund uncle is currently positioning himself to screw us out of our inheritance because of janky writing in the will and I'm doing my fuck all best to gain the wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with this cold motherfucker in court as the oldest and representative member of my happily much nicer and softer younger brothers who I want to remain that way not because I even care that much about the money, I know what bills affect your credit first and what you can put off paying and all of us have good enough career prospects to do our own thing, but just because I want to give the middle finger to a man that was a multi-millionaire and drew lines on his milk and orange juice bottles when I came over so he knew if I drank what my parents couldn't afford when I was approximately six. Anyway, ask me why I support major reforms in wealth taxation. I don't care who it goes to, just not that guy, you feel?

Having expendable income was very exciting for a bit after I started working but once I got to the hateable point of assessing my annual bonus and internally complaining that I'd spent the money I should have spent on a Sauternes cellar to drop five digits on bedset materials (to be fair they are drop dead gorgeous, very comfy and the factory pays a living wage for people to handmake the sheets/duvets/pillows to people in San Francisco, which is not cheap, so maybe I did more good than harm with that), I two seconds later nodded to myself and went "the government needs to confiscate more money from me". The narrative is always that the "undeserving" will use it for dumb things they don't need like iPhones or refrigerators...?...but like...I could also have gone to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a very nice sheet/comforter set for at most a tenth of what I paid so am I really spending it responsibly either....?....who is going to get more joy out of this misspent money....?....not me, that is for sure, I probably would have had more fun going to BBB and laying on all the demo beds and buying something there.

My lifelong dream, which may become possible if/when I do have something of an inheritance, is to provide food security for one of the many towns in the US were most residents don't have it. It's the thing I remember the most distinctly over the years. I never could quite believe it when I got to the point that I could just...pay to eat at a restaurant. One of the most disappointed my mother has ever been in me is when I was twenty five and confessed I actually had no idea how much a gallon of milk cost in a city grocery store besides that it was probably between $1 and $5, because I didn't have to know. For now I make a weekly drop off of my excess produce to a mom group I met under somewhat weird circumstances but I was walking through the cut-through that went through the low-income housing back to my apartment at like 2 AM on a Saturday and these moms were out there partying and smoking weed with their kids all strapped in strollers around or the older ones watched by a rotating member of the group and I felt very safe and like these moms had a very good vibe of both living their own lives [seriously for mental health parents but in most cases specifically mothers need to be able to keep up relationships with people their age] but keeping their children safe and accounted for while doing so and trying their fuckin' best against all the odds to figure out how to make that happen when life had dealt them a shit hand.

...anyway, looping way back to the original question of what finishing school is, when I was almost done with middle school my dad had built a legit construction business that then very quickly took off because we lived in a commutable zip code to the now-rich-in-their-own-right people he went to high school with who trusted him to redo their homes. We eventually moved to that zip code but I stayed and commuted back to my old high school. But, i was a pretty wild kid which my father appreciated for a long while because I would follow him around on jobs and enjoy doing physical labor, but once I was mid-puberty and also he had to maybe show me to his high school friends that did not fly.

I snapped - not broke, snapped - my left thumb and my parents had to trap me like a wild animal to get me to go the hospital. Then I got a deep cut that partially injured a tendon in my leg and at eleven I tried to beat the shit out of my dad to prevent him from picking me up to strap me in the car and go to the hopsital. Next I got a deep splinter due to my eternal-barefoot tendencies and it wouldn't come out so got infected and I refused to go to the doctor [another weird back story but I was minorly sexually assaulted [[to be clear, not raped or anything big traumatic]] when I was eight and had to stay in hospital for a week and my parents couldn't be with me all the time so I have a permanent heebie-jeebie about going to the hospital, not true anxiety, I will go if I know I need to and I don't breathe heavy or anything, and I'm actually not permanently weirded out by sex or anything, just doctors in hospitals specifically I kind of unconsciously try to justify not needing to the extent I can rationalize it] and my dad was tired of my antics so he was like "fine if you don't go I will slice your foot in half with a Swiss Army knife to get it out" and I called his bluff and laid down on the floor, stuck my foot on his lap, and he didn't really know what to do when a barely fourteen year old girl called his bluff so my brothers watched in fascinated but horrified awe as I got my foot sliced open spectacularly so that the infection/splinter could come out and I didn't even make a sound out of spite despite it being quite painful to my recollection almost twenty years later.

They saw me cry from pain exactly one time when while trying to break up a fight between all three of them (it was over ice cream) I got pushed and my ankle got dislocated and what actually made me cry was snapping it back in place and they realized it was not a joke. These dumb assholes that I love have ragged on me for "skipping" chores the day after I was in the hospital because the day before that I had to spend 18 hours running Thanksgiving as a good sub-hostess like I didn't have a serious infection that needed treating and couldn't rest because none of them were up to any task beyond peeling potatoes.

After the Swiss Army knife incident, my dad's discussion of sending me to finishing school became real, which I knew when my mom made me take a walk with her and talked about it. Finishing school is like...etiquette school....? In ye olden day when finishing high school was not the norm for anyone, wealthy men finished high school and wealthy women often went to "finishing" school to have a combined education on being a proper lady but also being able to hold a decent conversation with your presumably-educated husband, so it wasn't entirely etiquette non-academic. It was more just like "what a rich man wants in a wife" school, which was sort of household management and knowing enough about cleaning/cooking to correct the staff if they fucked up, how to be a polite hostess, and how to not entirely bore him when you were alone together and had done your five minutes of sex or whatever so actually had to have a conversation. In modern times it has obviously expanded to be less bleak.

I said miss me with that, I can be a girl on my own, so I went full throttle into the girliest sport they offer in high school and ever since have gained the inestimable advantage of knowing how to also use femininity to my advantage, which I am very grateful to my parents for making me learn. It would be great if we lived in a world where that didn't count, but it did/still does, and they really set me up to operate in all the worlds.

It is weird for me to tell the story to Internet strangers because it's one of those things that makes your parents sound terrible and abusive in the general tone of the Internet nowadays, and while I support gender nonconforming children I don't remember my childhood or parents that way. But, I feel like the bits and pieces of my life I've given don't always make a ton of sense together without the context, so here it is, and in the end, I think a number of parts of it are areas where you can probably understand where it makes me have the opinions I do when I write.

Anyhoo, this makes my life sound far worse than it is, I actually have a great life and I am not unhappy with it at all and feel I was on the whole blessed with many more turns of luck than unluck, so, please, do not take this as a depressed artist rant, it is more like a rant of a very energetic person who rants about a lot of things all the time and didn’t need to come out but just did because the question was asked and the time was right with my life being in a bit of flux to think about how I got where I am and where I want to go and why.

Always remember no matter what problems it seems like I have, if I didn’t solve them on my 2 year round the world traveling hiatus I took from working, it’s my own fault, I definitely had the time and money to solve them and just chose not to.

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sevenincubistolemyheart · 5 years ago

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Hey I wanted to message you but for some reason Tumblr won't let me. I've been writing a BTS Au set in a College setting and it's the first thing I've ever written. This is just the prologue and it's in third person point of view

Summary: Samantha was ecstatic that she was accepted into one of the top Universities in the country. Even more thrilled that she was one of the 8 student to be offered a full scholarship. One of the benefits of the scholarship is getting to live in a luxury apartment instead of a tiny dorm room. However when she learns that her new neighbors, the other seven recipients of the scholarship, only received it because of their connections to the college, she vowes to never associate with any of them, under any circumstances. But what happens when all of them start to pursue her.

Samantha was thrilled when she was accepted into the University of her dreams. It was one of the most selective colleges in the country. When she was getting her AA degree, she somehow managed to keep a 4.0 GPA while acting as Student Government President and clocking 62 hours of Community Service. All of that torture was the reason she was not only accepted, but was one of the eight students to receive a Full Scholarship.

She had always considered herself to be an independent woman. But now that she truly was going to be on her own, in a completely different part of the country, she had to admit that she was kinda scared. She would no longer have her friends around for movie marathons and dinner parties, she always knew it was going to happen, but it didn't make it any easier when it actually happened. All she could do was think about how amazing this was going to be for her future and for her. She also couldn't deny how excited she was about finally getting to have a real college experience. She got her AA at a state college and was living at home, and she couldn't wait to see what it was like and to meet new people.

There were many perks that came from her scholarship, like not having to pay the crazy expensive tuition, but the big kahuna was the living situation that came with it. One of the members of the Board of Trustees owns an apartment building, about 15 minutes from campus. This year any student that received a full ride scholarship would be allowed to live in an apartment there for free instead of one of the forma on campus. Sure there were only 8 full ride scholarships so it wasn't like he was giving up the whole building, but still she thought it was an extremely generous offer, and she sure as hell wasn't going to complain about it and if you saw the place you wouldn't either. To say it was nice would be an understatement. The entire building practically screamed luxurious. It had a restaurant, gym, pool, office spaces, conference rooms and a 24 hour Cafe. And her apartment was just to die for. There were only two apartments on the entire floor, hers and the penthouse, which took up a majority of the floor. She could only assume that it was huge based on the size of her apartment. It was a spacious 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, it had a kitchen and a living room, with a mini office space in the corner with a desk. Plus the walls were soundproof so she could be as loud as she wanted to without getting told to shut the fuck up. It was pretty cool that her last 2 years of absolute hell had paid off, and that she was living here in this place instead of a tiny ass dorm with a roommate she would most likely hate. The situation was kind of perfect but there was just one problem, the seven guys living in the penthouse next door.

It turned out that one of the boys was the son of that Board of Trustees member and him and his friends received the scholarship because of that. It left a bitter taste in her mouth that these guys were practically handed their scholarships on a silver platter when she worked her ass off to get hers. She felt even more upset for the kids who worked just as hard as she did and we're more deserving of the scholarship instead of the seven guys who didn't even need it because they had "daddy's money". The guys themselves were all extremely attractive, but they were your typical entitled douchebags. They were basically an unofficial frat with how many parties they threw and the number of girls that came crawling to their apartment. Boy was she glad that the walls were soundproof. Samantha avoided them like the plague. Nothing pissed her off more than someone with zero work ethic and thinks they're better than everyone else because they have more power or money. She was raised to work harder than everyone else around her, it was embedded into her brain and she lived that, it was why she made the accomplishments she had. So she made a pact with herself. Never get close the the BTS guys and if they make the mistake of trying immediately shut them down and put them in their rightful place. She made the pact official by taking a shot of vodka and putting on a Harry Potter movie and let herself get lost in the Giblet of Fire. Let's do this thing

I was really hoping for some feedback as this is the first thing I've ever written. I'm open to changing it to first person p.o.v I just started writing it in third person. Please let me know what you think so far.

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Hi hun, I'm flattered you enjoy my works enough to want me to review but I'm honestly not really good enough to do any kind of judging for others works aha. I'm just...some person ya know?

I also kind of don't want to set a precedent. I don't have much time to write as it is and the few fics I want to read and have time for get added at my side blog for fic recs. I would feel bad if I turned down a bunch of people asking me for feedback and I don't want to feel pressured into doing so either.

I will say, especially for your first work at least for my experience, you'll look back and cringe like nothing else as you learn and grow. But the catch is you don't grow unless you write and(if you want) share with others. It's hard. I started out in 5th grade so my writing was...aha. You can imagine. My role playing also helped develop my fic writing when that eventually came to be(when I entered high school). Just keep at it if it brings you joy!

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rumandtimes · 3 years ago

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College Must Be Abolished

Peter Marrows

Senior Academic Contributor

In the United States, colleges are not so much educational centres as they are economic epicentres for local communities. Ask any small town mayor of a so-called “college town” what the municipal budget will look like or prioritise, and he will not tout his citizens, but will probably refer to the local college as an “economic engine” that needs to be expanded or preserved.

In America, the sector of tertiary education is one of the largest employers on the continent. A college of even just 1,000 students hires dozens of menial staff, hundreds of faculty, and as of late hold onto even more administrators and administrative assistants than faculty. Those thousand college students attending a middle-of-nowhere, no-name college are eager to burn their parents’ money rather than continue the pretence of mediocre education, which leads merchants to set up around the campus borders and tailor to those wasteful impulses.

As such, a college in the United States is not a place of learning but a hub of services. Millions of dollars in inflated tuition, unnecessary salaries, and questionable impulses pass through the halls every year, not to mention propping up the technology and real estate sectors in seasonal laptop and apartment sales, both of which start to become overpriced much like everything else purchased by and marketed towards students.

But there may be no need for college at all.

The open sewer of fraud and bad faith loans that college recruiters depend upon to scam American high schoolers into supplementing their own government paycheques and educational subsidies is both a lifeline and a goldmine: for small towns that dragnet underachieving students with promises of the mythical university degree, despite their bad grades and lazy demeanour that would pre-empt them from a scholarship or acceptance to a better place of learning; and for shady universities who tell high schoolers that their campus will give them some kind of non-existent prestige or exclusivity, because they prey on students with 3.5–4.0 GPAs yet still offer an education that is left wanting versus a Udemy or Khan Academy course.

As students are lied to about what the nature of colleges are, they can often miss the signs that a college is not useful to them at all. Colleges are not meant to educate students above all else, but meant to exploit students for financial gain.

In North America, tales are told to high schoolers that anyone who wants to live a normal life needs to go to college, to get a respectable salary requires college, and that only the rich or high-achieving will ever go off to a college campus and escape the relative trappings of home. If this is not the mythology of a scam, akin to a snake oil salesman or the common fearmonger, then what is?

The government does not protect students from these lies, but shovels them into such a predatory system by subsidising colleges with loans and loosely defined accreditations. This is why American children are signing away their souls, coming away $250,000 USD in debt at the age of 23 for a “piece of paper.” Some might call $250,000 a small pittance for a high quality education in good skills and a guaranteed lifetime of a high-paid and rewarding career, but, as referenced before, the quality of the American college education is extremely low and often does not confer any kinds of skills of really information at all on many students, and there is no significant increase in prospects for employment or a job when it is all over.

Of the students who do find a pipeline to a job after graduation, it usually has absolutely nothing to do with the colleges, but instead internship programmes which companies run that discriminatively seek out young people and upperclassmen as students. The students who actually learn something during their time in college are routinely those students who go “above and beyond” the college curriculum, and education themselves on their own time, merely under the guidance of a professorship. They are learning, but not being taught, it just so happens that they are at a college while teaching themselves.

The question should be asked, what if these job training and internship drives were open to the general public and not purposefully made exclusive to juniors and seniors in colleges? And what if people were allowed to educate themselves and apply for an accreditation like a degree, similar to how home-schooling works in the United States, instead of getting tied into the college system?

Colleges like to admit the most accomplished students for two reasons: those students give the illusion that the college teaches their students, and those students do not need to be taught. Culling the applicants for the 4.0–5.0 GPA applicants means that colleges want people who already have an education, not as a baseline for improving that education, but as an easy grab for a student they can simply coast to a degree on the back of their secondary school education. If colleges were interested in educating and improving people’s lives, they would be marketed as a remedial and second chance option for straight-C students, the students who actually still have something to learn. Straight-A students are pretty much a finished set as soon as you get them, and often don’t need any additional help.

Colleges like to sign job agreements with companies, ostensibly so that qualified students can find a job and so that companies can find qualified applicants, but in reality it only makes it more difficult for normal people, the 75% of American children who do not go to college, to find a job. Colleges are therefore not building, but destroying the job market, by positioning themselves as a harmful man-in-the-middle (MITM) to progress in life. There is also the concern of just how “qualified” the most qualified college graduate is, as new hires are still put on a several-years-long job training suspension after being hired anyways.

College is above all dangerous for the average American student. The ubiquity of bullying, drug culture, hazing culture, abuse in sororities and fraternities, alcoholism culture, rape culture, defiance of due process, and financial exploitation makes college on of the riskiest times for American adults, and leaves countless millions of the 17–25 year olds beaten, changed, and alone during their time away from their parents and hometown friends.

What if there were no more colleges? The lacklustre American education programme could certainly be accelerated to accommodate college curriculum into high schools; most high schools in America have a program that teaches high school students up to the sophomore level in college already. Elementary education could mandatorily begin in preschool. Primary or middle school education could begin in elementary school. Secondary or high school education could begin in primary school. And college education could begin in secondary school. This is often already the case for so-called “advanced” students, but these opportunities could be made uniform, and undercut the cartel of colleges since elementary, primary, and secondary education are free.

What this would look like in the mathematics would be: Counting in preschool; Times tables in early elementary; Prealgebra in late elementary. Algebra in early primary; Precalculus in late primary; Calculus I, II, and III in secondary; Mathematical theory the year of graduation. Currently, many American students are still in precalculus at the college level, which is not only a disgrace in itself that needs to change, but both inflates the necessity and diminishes the use of American colleges. Undergraduate or community college can then become the equivalent of what graduate school is now. Any student that falls behind should be left behind; if a student fails the eighth grade, let them stay in the 8th grade until they pass. There should not be a stigma or a minimum age requirement on graduation from school. A school was never meant to be the pure and complete centre of a person’s social, familial, developmental, and professional life, much like it currently is in the United States.

As for hiring, if companies were prevented from discriminating in their internships and job training programmes and had to hire from the general populace, and were required to provide job training to all hires rather than outsourcing that requirement to colleges, employment and employability in the United States would increase in an equitable manner, and those employees would be better at their jobs because they would jumping right into the real-world scenario, not going over abstract theory of what it might be like to one day have a job in a detached college classroom. That would be no small task, as that theory would still need to be taught, but tailored to the individual company. No matter how difficult a transition, it would surely have to be more efficient to train on the job than to nationally spend billions of dollars on colleges that leave hundreds of thousands of graduates unemployed, and unemployable, with no option of a reset button for the rest of their life.

The most costly aspect of colleges and their patented system of delayed education and gatekeeping to the job market is Time. The age of a graduate is 22 to 27 years old. The minimum age to become president of the United States is 35, a job that was meant to only accept people who are old, and at a median or end point of their career. The mid-twenties is a long time to wait to start a life, especially when the rest of that life is not guaranteed to you, and the conventional retirement age is around 60. With the current system of education and employment, you get around three decades to live your life, following three decades of being treated like a child in the education and new hire system, and proceeding just one or two decades of retirement before you die and your being is permanently erased from the Earth itself.

Students should be able to have lives while they go to school, and that schooling should end around the age 19, and around the mid-to-late-twenties for post-graduate professionals like medical researchers. It’s difficult to fathom where the current assumption in the educational system for the United States came from, that people have unlimited time and money to burn.

Abolishing College has the benefits of giving a longer, more fulfilling, more educated, and freer and equitable life. The only detractors of such a cause might be the drug addicts and serial rapists who prey on college students; or the multi-billion dollar, government-subsidised education market, that small town mayors have come to be enamoured with. The college cartel has no place in the economic sector or in the social sector of people’s lives, and their polluting and corrupting interests represent a battle the American people must have to improve their country.

Just as the pharmaceutical and insurance cartels lavished for generations in the lies that they were the good guys while letting their clients die on the operating floor, people must wise up to the harmful and counterproductive place colleges and universities have in American life. The battle to topple those massive corporations as a historically bad track record in the modern United States, yet is another battle Americans must have for the improvement of the lives, education, and health of themselves and their children.

Americans colleges are unnecessary, overvalued, and place a significant strain on the economy. It is long time for education to strengthen itself, and do away with the parasites of four-year, degree-offering universities and colleges.

#College #Employment #Finance #Abolish College #Free College #University #Sanders #Cruz #Warren

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zipgrowth · 6 years ago

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Beyond Tuition: How Innovations in College Affordability Are (Or Aren’t) Helping Students

The college affordability crisis is a familiar story to most Americans. A simplified version often goes that state funding for higher-ed institutions has decreased dramatically over the years, which has translated into massive tuition hikes for students and their families.

Sandy Baum, a fellow in the Education Policy Program at the Urban Institute, watches the issue—and its proposed solutions—closely. The story usually gets encapsulated into examples of students trapped in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. And while this may be the case for some students, Baum notes that it’s not always the full picture.

Adding to that complexity of affordability and financial aid, a handful of startups and nonprofits have pitched themselves as a solution for students, whether it’s helping them find and apply for financial aid or by offering shorter-term and cheaper alternative degrees.

EdSurge talked with Baum about these issues—and about how innovative approaches are or aren’t helping solve the college affordability crisis. Subscribe to the EdSurge On Air podcast on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher). Or read highlights from the conversation (which have been edited and condensed for clarity).

EdSurge: So, tuition has skyrocketed but we know there are a lot of additional costs associated with college. There's housing, transportation and plenty of others. One criticism of free community college programs, is that they don't account for these expenses always So from your perspective, are these free programs free enough?

Baum: There are lots of weaknesses to free community college programs. One of them is that free means tuition-free. It does not usually mean that your whole budget is covered. The reality is that for low-income students, a very large percentage of low and moderate-income students get their tuition covered at community colleges even without these programs because they are eligible for any say, grant aids.

Most [free] college programs are what we call last-dollar programs, where they say if you do not have enough grant aid to cover your tuition and fees, then we'll give you money to cover the rest of it. So most of the free community college programs are only giving extra money to people who aren't really poor, who can afford to pay the tuition. They're not helping low-income students at all, in terms of giving them extra money.

What we would need would be if you actually erased the tuition, and the low-income students could keep their Pell Grants. Then they could use that money to help cover their books and supplies and their living expenses. So just saying free tuition, absolutely does nothing to help financially most of the low-income students. It does not address the problems that students face with their living expenses while they are in school.

That idea that you shared of what this could look like in order to be more supportive for low-income students, are there any examples of that actually happening right now?

Some of the local College Promise programs I think do that. But often no. The free community college program that the Obama Administration proposed at the national level would have made tuition go away and let people keep their Pell Grants, but the fact is that's a much more expensive way to do it, and that's the reason that that's not the way it usually happens.

You've said before that the type of a degree that a student earns is part of the college-cost equation. Could you explain that a bit more?

If you buy something that's cheap but you end up throwing it in the garbage can the next day, it was really not worth it. And the same thing holds for a college.

Sure. When people talk about, ‘Is college affordable or not?’ unfortunately, too often, what they're actually saying is it's expensive and you think that things that are expensive are worse for people than things that are cheaper. And the reality is that college is an investment, and people go to college for a number of reasons. We hope that one of those good reasons is to learn and to think better and to improve their lives, but it also is of course to improve their employment opportunities and to increase their wages. And for most people, college is a very good investment. So you pay for it up front and then it pays off over the long run. And what that means is that the question is, ‘Is it a good investment?’

If you buy something that's cheap but you end up throwing it in the garbage can the next day, it was really not worth it. And the same thing holds for a college. If you just pick the cheapest program, but it turns out to be a lousy school—they don't have enough support systems, you don't graduate or you graduate and you can't get a job with your degree—then it doesn't matter how little you paid for it, it wasn't worth it. It wasn't affordable.

However, you might invest in a relatively expensive education and it will pay off over your life. If you borrowed money, you can pay it back out of your earnings premium without using up that earnings premium, and you will have had an affordable education even if it was expensive. So the value of what you're buying is very important.

There's certainly been an uptick in the number of alternative online degrees and badges over the years. When you talk about the value of a degree being part of the cost equation, what do you make of these, and what are some of the pros and cons you see here?

Well, one of the issues with many of these certifications is that they may pay off really well, but that actually the people who benefit from them are frequently people who already have gone to college. So it's really important to divide these badges and certifications up and to divide the people who are taking advantage of them up into the categories of where they are when they start out. So these coding bootcamps that were all the rage for a while, the people who seemed to be most successful with them were people who already had bachelors degrees.

Online learning can be wonderful for many people, but the people who don't already know how to study and learn, the people who have not been successful in school already, are least likely to benefit from them. They are most likely to have outcomes that are not nearly as good as outcomes in the classroom. So it's really hard to paint these with a broad brush.

Advocates of these sorts of micro-credentials will sometimes argue that it can be an alternative to paying the thousands of dollars that a degree might cost. So knowing the risks that you mentioned, do you buy that at all?

This is not really about college affordability. I mean, I think that the issue is that many people are starting college programs that they don't finish. And that's a terrible problem. So if all you know is, ‘I'm supposed to go to college,’ and you have no idea what you want to do and you go to a school that doesn't serve you well or you wander around and you take a bunch of classes and you end up with nothing, that's really not a good plan.

There's a lot of evidence that having more structure, the whole movement towards guided pathways, is really important. And these micro-credentials and badges are generally very specific, where your goal is and you can do it in a shorter time, and that can be very helpful for a lot of people. So that seems really important and in that sense it certainly helps with the affordability problem. But it's not at all clear that these things are, in general, cheaper per course or cheaper per year than a college degree.

There's a number of nonprofits and for-profit startups that have formed in recent years to address college affordability by helping students find and apply for financial aid and scholarships. Are these ideas new, and do you see some of these newer startups making a dent in the issue?

It is not in any way a new idea, that you might charge people to help them get financial aid. It has been something that has been a serious problem for people for many years. You should not have to pay anyone to do a financial-aid application, to find where you apply, to get the financial aid that you have coming to you. The federal government has a form that everybody has to fill out. Institutions will help you. Non-profit organizations will help you. You can get help online. I would be very careful before recommending, to anyone, that they spend money to apply for financial aid.

Your research has found that student-loan debt is not created equal, and that wealthier students often take on more student debt. Can you say more about your findings?

Right, so first of all, the student debt problem is not by and large a problem of students borrowing a lot of money. It's a problem of students borrowing money and then not getting an education that is a good value, or that turns out in retrospect to be affordable. So, in other words, the default rates on student loans are inversely related to how much you borrowed, so the people most likely to default are people who borrowed less than $10,000. That accounts for a huge percentage of the default.

People who borrow a lot of money are less likely to default, and that's because those are people, by and large, who went to school for a long time. They have at least a Bachelor's degree, and most of them who have huge amounts of debt also have some sort of a graduate education. And so they are much more likely to repay their loans than people who borrowed a little bit.

People who are older borrow more than people who are younger (adults going back to school). And part of that is simply that the federal government has higher loan limits for older students—they're allowed to borrow more, and of course they don't have parents who could borrow instead. And they borrow for they're living expenses. It's not that they're going to expensive colleges, although they are more likely to go to for-profit colleges. So older students are quite vulnerable.

Black students also borrow significantly more at every degree level than people from other racial and ethnic groups, including Hispanic students. So black students who get their Bachelor's degrees, one, tend to be older and have been at school for a longer time than other institutions than others. And they just have much higher default rates and more difficulty repaying their loans. They earn less when they graduate.

So black students and older students and students who go to for-profit institutions, are the students who borrow the most for their level of education. And that's a problem.

But it's not the image of, here's this middle-class, white student going off and getting a Bachelor's degree and having $100,000 of debt. That is just so rare. There are so few people in that situation, those are not the people we need to be worried about.

It's not uncommon to hear that the cost of college isn't worth it anymore. What's your response to that narrative when you hear it?

It's extremely irritating and very frustrating. And almost everyone who says that is sending their own children to college. I mean, the average return to a college education is as high as it has ever been, and the payoff doesn't have to keep rising over time in order to be very worth it. And so it's just the best investment that most people could make.

It is true that too many people are going to college and not completing. And, if you go to college and you don't complete, you get very little of the benefit. So it means you have to make decisions that are good. You can't just go to college, you have to think about where you're going and why you're going and what you're going to study, just as you would if you were starting a small business. You wouldn't just say, oh, I'm going to open a business. You would try to figure out which businesses will have a good rate of return.

Earlier this year you testified before the Senate Health Committee regarding reauthorizing the Higher Education Act and improving college affordability. So looking ahead, how seriously do you think senators are considering college costs, and what are you expecting to come out of that if the act is reauthorized?

Well, it's not looking good for the act being reauthorized in the short run. It's really going to depend, I think, on the composition of congress at the time that the act gets reauthorized.

I think that there are some important things that congress can do and may do. They may strengthen student loan programs. They may make income-based loan repayment simpler, more transparent, easier for students to navigate, and that's a very important piece of college affordability because if you are one of the people who goes to college and borrows money and then it doesn't pay off, then that is a really difficult situation to be in, and we need to have a system that makes it possible for you to easily get the insurance that you need that if it doesn't pay off you're not going to be stuck repaying these loans that didn't do you any good.

I worry that some people are thinking about college affordability for middle and upper-income students instead of taking that college affordability for the people who really can't afford it. So we really need to be focused on the institutions that educate the vast majority of students. Those are public institutions, and they are not necessarily the public flagships but broad access public foyers, community colleges. And the other thing we really need to do—and I would hope that this would happen, but it’s not immediately on the horizon—is that we need to protect students from the kind of fraud and abuse that they get at many institutions, particularly at many for-profit institutions.

Beyond Tuition: How Innovations in College Affordability Are (Or Aren’t) Helping Students published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

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dorothydelgadillo · 7 years ago

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The Only Thing Stopping Your Successful Tech Career Is…

Let me guess: you’re so over your current career, and—from everything you’ve read and heard—tech sounds like a dream path for getting to where you’d rather be. Working on interesting, creative projects in a cutting-edge industry? Check. Getting paid a salary that can actually help you get ahead on your bills? Check. Being able to work a flexible schedule from outside a traditional brick and mortar office? Check on that, too. So why aren’t you already learning tech skills, like yesterday? Whatever reasons you feel are holding you back from pursuing the tech career of your dreams, I bet they have something in common with what we hear from our students on a daily basis.

The good news is, no matter how real and overwhelming these reasons might seem to you, they’re not nearly as big a problem as you might think—in fact, they might not even be a problem at all. So sit back and read on as we round up the top five reasons you haven’t started your tech career yet, and you’ll see why each of these myths need to be returned to the Fiction section—stat!

I Don’t Have the Time

Perception of time can derail any kind of career change —specifically the amount of time needed to learn the skills and acquire the credentials or certifications necessary for taking on a new job. Flashbacks to years spent languishing in college classrooms are enough to send even the most iron-willed career change prospects running for the hills, and an industry like tech—with its arcane sounding acronyms and terminology—seems like a particularly intensive time commitment.

The Facts:

But feel free to breathe a sigh of relief—it won’t take that long to learn the basics you’ll need to break into tech. Unlike careers that really will take years to transition into, tech is realistically approachable within a year or less of training—a statement that’s been consistently affirmed to me by tech professionals. Whether it’s a tech pro like Wendy Zenone, Application Security Engineer at Lending Club, who worked adjacent to tech in marketing and established her foundational tech skills through a 12-week coding bootcamp, Blair McKee, Digital Marketing Manager at DNS Made Easy who entered tech in a non-technical role as a copywriter and taught herself web design over the course of a year, or Matt Hubbard, Director of Operations at Fullcontact, who worked in foreign policy and landed his first tech job before he’d even finished taking classes in information systems, I have yet to hear a story where it took someone multiple years to gain the skills they needed to start in tech.

The serious time investment in tech comes more on the back end, after you’re already employed. Although it’s a short timeline to get started, once you do start working in tech you’ll begin a lifetime of learning, adapting, and improving—it’s simply part of the industry. As Izzy Piyale-Sheard, Community Manager at coding bootcamp Lighthouse Labs, told me, even instructors with 20 years of experience at his company are still constantly learning. The upside with tech is that all this learning is on the clock and built-in as part of the job. So if concerns about time have been holding you back, let them go. The time is now!

It’s Too Expensive

Even if tech skills don’t come with a prohibitive time investment, what about the money? The term “tech” brings to mind self-driving cars, commercial space flights, and inflated real estate markets. That all sounds expensive, so it must mean learning tech skills is ridiculously pricey too, right? Wrong! While there will, of course, be a money investment if you attend coding bootcamps or enroll in coding classes online, with average yearly college tuitions for state schools coming in at a staggering $14,210, any amount you pay will be a fraction of what it costs to get a conventional degree. What’s more, there are two significant factors that ease the sting of paying to learn tech skills.

The Facts:

The first is the fact that entry-level tech jobs have a track record of returning on their investment within months of employment. In speaking with Skillcrush alum Chi-Chi Ross, she told me that she landed her first tech job two months after she started a Skillcrush course (and three weeks before the course was even finished). “I was able to make back the money I spent on the course and keep earning significantly more that I’d been able to make before,” Ross said. “Once I started working at my new job I more than doubled what I was making—in fact I saw a 108% increase in my income.”

Similarly, Emily K. Olson told me that by the time she finished learning HTML and CSS through Skillcrush, she’d already landed a remote job with a New York City based company, allowing her to make back the money she’d spent on classes while working from her home on the West Coast (in between travelling the world). “Not only did I earn back the money I invested before I really had a chance to miss it,” Olson said, “but learning tech skills has changed the way I feel, the way I see myself, and improved my life overall for the better.”

However, even when a return on investment is imminent, it doesn’t mean you won’t miss the initial cash until then. But there’s good news on that front too: unlike what you might remember from college or other certification programs where high tuition was accompanied by outrageous materials and textbook fees, free tech resources abound! Whether you’re learning tech skills or once you’re working in the industry, so many of the tools and information you’ll need cost absolutely nothing. Of particular interest if you’re just getting started are free blogs and forums like Codrops and Stack Overflow where you can find tutorials, web design blueprints, Q&A forums and more, all totally free of charge. So don’t believe the hype—99-percenters can afford to learn tech skills, too!

I’m Not Smart Enough

When people want to assure someone that a skill or task doesn’t require any exceptional level of intelligence or know-how, they often trot out the old cliche, “it’s not rocket science.” But when we’re talking about tech, it’s not as easy to dismiss that way. Computers, smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and all the apps and software that run on them sure seem pretty “rocket sciencey,” which leads to doubts that those of us who aren’t already rocket scientists or preternaturally gifted with genius IQs are simply “not smart enough” to learn tech skills. This fear seems to come from a misunderstanding of tech more than any genuine intellectual challenges, and “smart”—more often than not—really translates to, “I’m not good at math,” something that might seem to be a requirement for tech, but totally isn’t.

The Facts:

When it comes to thinking that math is a big part of tech, no one will fault you for that preconception—I mean, the whole thing is built on 1’s and 0’s—but it really isn’t the case in practice. When I interviewed tech pros on the subject last summer, Monica Lent, Lead Front End Engineer at SumUp, told me that she personally struggled with math all through school. “I was terrible at geometry, terrible at algebra, didn’t complete calculus. I’m even slow at arithmetic,” Lent said. Still, that hasn’t stopped Lent from managing a team of five web developers and proving that math and computer science aren’t the only direct routes to a tech career. Web Developer Charlotte O’Hara, who also described having no background in math outside of basic arithmetic, says this is possible because most web development projects don’t rely heavily on math at all. According to O’Hara, critical thinking and an eye for design are far more important as a web developer than math calculations.

Even so, it’s also important to remember that your own perceptions of being “smart” or “good at math” are often just that—perceptions. Ultimately, my previous look at math and coding led to a 2017 Science Magazine study that suggests our perception of our ability (and not our ability itself) is a huge determinant for success. So rather than convince yourself what you can’t do, think about what you can do, and couple that positive attitude with the encouraging examples of others who have paved the way before you.

It’s Too Risky to Make a Change

Yeah, your job sucks, but you know it’s there and you know what to expect from it. What happens if you take the time and spend the money to learn tech skills, but then can’t find a job in tech? And even if you do find a tech job, can you count on it being secure going into the future? For the risk averse, this kind of gamble might seem too high stakes—but it turns out, tech isn’t really a gamble at all.

The Facts:

I recently looked into the question of tech job security, and the first thing I found was data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics listing software/application developers as the 5th-place growth job between now and 2026. What’s more, of the 30 occupations listed, developers came in second place for median salaries ($100,080). This paints a pretty clear picture that tech jobs will be plentiful and high paying for the foreseeable future. And, as Dasha Moore, Chief Operating Officer and Founder at Solodev explained to me, tech job growth doesn’t just mean more numbers of the same kind of jobs—instead, it speaks directly to the fact that tech is continuing to penetrate more and more industries and positions, meaning more opportunities and greater job security with every passing year. As tech becomes increasingly entrenched in every aspect of business, government, manufacturing, healthcare, etc., the concern should become less about whether investing in tech skills is risky, and more about how risky it is not to!

I’m Too Old

A question we hear a lot when helping with customer support at Skillcrush is whether prospective tech learners are “too old” to learn tech skills. Interestingly, the “old” in this question is all over the map, as it comes in from enquirers aged 16 to 65 (and all points in between). On one hand, it’s a very easy question to answer (simply, “no”), but this age issue often becomes a very real (if very unnecessary) obstacle in learning tech skills (or making any major career changes). As someone who started working outside the home again in my 40’s after 12 years as a full-time parent, I can speak to the fact that I let the “too old” hangup get in my way for a long time.

The Facts:

Last September we started a blog feature titled “Who Codes?”, looking at diversity in the tech industry (believe it or not, tech consists of a lot more than the proverbial dudes in their 20’s high-fiving and wearing hoodies), and—over the three installments we’ve run so far—four of the six coders we’ve featured are in their 40’s, well outside the stereotype of the tech wunderkind. One of those 40-something coders—Jill Caren, owner of digital agency 2 Dogs Media LLC—didn’t even start coding until she was in her 30’s. After spending a lot of money hiring someone else to build a website for her retail business and being disappointed with the final product, Caren taught herself PHP, CSS, and HTML so she could be the designer, and—in the process—realized web development was what she actually wanted to be doing career-wise (and what she’s still doing successfully today).

Precisely because tech skills are so accessible, and—as discussed above—are neither prohibitively time consuming or expensive to learn, any time and any age is the right time to add them to your toolkit. If you let your age fears win, all that happens is you’ll be another day older tomorrow, but you won’t have started learning tech skills—and even then, you STILL won’t be too old to start!

from Web Developers World https://skillcrush.com/2018/01/03/the-only-thing-stopping-your-successful-tech-career-is/

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