Do poor people have the right to free services just because they are poor?
I ask that question after reading Debt-Free Colleges: Schools That Won’t Saddle You With Loans by Forbes contributer John Wasik.
Wasik notes that grants are based on needs. Family income limits range from $40,000 to 60,000, but grants also depend on number of wage earners in the household, single parents, whether a child is a dependent and a whole range of other financial factors.
Divorce, medical expenses, job loss, etc. also make a huge difference in whether you’re considered for the non-loan offer.
Finally, you need to be an above-average student just to get in the door.
Reverse Discrimination
Reader Marty emailed this comment on the practice: “Poor people should not be entitled to attend elite colleges for nothing. Someone has to pay. This practice is more redistribution ‘justice’, especially applicable to low-income persons admitted using discrimination or reverse discrimination criteria.”
Wage Discrimination
Charging people what they can afford to pay constitutes wage discrimination.
If the same practice applied to restaurants, the poor would eat Filet Mignon at fancy restaurants for free, while the middle class would pay $200 and the wealthy $2,000 for the same meal.
The Real Solution
The real solution, as I have pointed out many times, is free online education from places like the Khan Academy and Coursera.
Inexpensive online education is the future. Student debt and socialist handouts are the past.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
“The real solution, as I have pointed out many times, is free online education…”
All online education needs is accreditation. Unfortunately, governments have a big role in accreditation and they are going resist giving it to institutions that compete with the ‘education’ establishment.
Correct – accreditation is needed for the online courses. With some state controlled activities, you just need to past a state test. For instance, in NJ, you can be a Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) by just passing the state LPN exam. But for a Registered Nurse (RN), you need to go to a school that has a state approved RN program and past the NJ RN exam. There are many jobs that require some sort of proof that you have learned that trade. That may mean that we need more other recognized bodies that can assess that you actually learned what you say you know – not that it is my favorite solution, but not sure what is better.
need/demand for ‘accreditation’ is greatly diminished when overall trust in government is collapsing.
we may sooner reach a point whereby ‘accreditation’ is viewed negatively, and ‘independent’ education becomes more coveted.
Academic grants should happen in my mind regardless of income level. The problem is we make exceptions based on income when we should be setting academic standards for admission and stick to them for the award based on academics. This is a big part of the problem now for your everyday student. Eighty percent do not belong in college, when they must take remedial classes to even be able to complete college level work.
The world is not about good feelings and equality based on race or color but on the abilities of the individual to excel and have the drive to achieve the requirements to enter a college.
Alas then colleges would go belly up because they could no longer handout loans to people that do not belong there, because they cannot file bankruptcy on the loan.
I would support the idea of extending those merit based scholarships to the top 10% of a high school graduating class, with additional conditions or course:
1.) For a high school student to be eligible to apply, he must have been enrolled in the same public high school their entire sophomore, junior, and senior years.
2.) The scholarship must be used at a state college or university in the same state from which the student graduated high school.
3.) The major selected must be S.T.E.M or education. No liberal arts, no business / finance.
4.) The student must maintain a GPA greater than 3.20 and no grade lower than a C in every semester.
5.) If a student is able to finish high school early, and be accepted into a STEM college program, then the student shall automatically qualify for the scholarship.
6.) If a student declines the scholarship by selecting a non-qualifying college or STEM, then then no award is made, and the award may not be claimed by transferring into a qualifying college or STEM program at a later time.
7.) The award may be delayed for students enlisting in the armed services, and would be applied after college tuition benefits accrued through the military have been exhausted.
What behaviors would this cause?
1.) Hopefully study harder.
2.) decrease in drug and alcohol use.
3.) Decrease in unwanted teen pregnancies.
4.) Increasing one’s chances by moving to a district where the student could win a scholarship. This would promote social integration among socioeconomic classes.
5.) Fraud using a PO Box or relative’s address in the district of choice. This is already done even without the lure of scholarship.
6.) Bribing teachers for grades.
7.) Plagiarism and cheating on tests.
8.) Declining private school enrollment, but that’s going to happen anyway with the next recession.
Georgia has one of those. It also led to dramatic grade inflation at my alma mater, Georgia Tech.
https://secure.gacollege411.org/Financial_Aid_Planning/HOPE_Program/Georgia_s_HOPE_Scholarship_Program_Overview.aspx
Just making sure everyone gets to pay for their loss of self esteem sir, its the price of the self importance of a social hierarchy, sir.
“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily. ~Thomas Szasz”
Well if everyone is going to get a free college education then I want my college loans forgiven.
I attend an online Georgia Tech Masters IT program http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/ which will run about 7k in total. The degree is accredited (from a top IT school) and not called out as being “online”.
I chose this after looking at my states more expensive and “lower learning” equivalents. It uses a “mooc” like concept with the courses being very interesting and challenging.
Definitely believe this has a big role in the future of education.
Ivy League colleges engage in bald face price fixing, they all use the same financial aid formula, they “sniff,sniff” won’t price compete for students. Clearly illegal price fixing except in a land where Ivy league lawyers contort the laws.
Micro agressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces, free speech zones. At a cost of 10’s of thousands of dollars a year, per student.
Janet Napolitano (sp?) took over the California college system and put out the word that professors were not supposed to use certain words in front of their students.
College is supposed to be a place of higher learning and the free expression of ideas, not an indoctrination center at the cost of a trillion dollar college loan bubble.
This week, it was announced that tuition was going to go up to $50,000 a year at USC. That’s $200,000 for a 4 year degree. That doesn’t include room and board. Mentioned in the news story, was that a large percentage of students receive grants and scholarships. One, on camera said she had a full scholarship.
Yes, the more aid, government fund’s, the more cost, administration, wasted dollars.
All kinds of distortions in gov’t assisted housing, rent control etc. Even social security is torqued to provide more benefits for those who earned and contributed less.
Gender neutral life ins subsidizes wimmin in the interest of fairness, men pay higher premiums for car ins, also in the interest of fairness.
Would society be better off if everyone ate filet mignon? Analogy failure. I don’t believe the proposal is to allow lesser qualified poor students in, as is the case with affirmative action.
The answer to high college tuition and advanced education is inheritance and freedom via monetary Gifting….not re-distribution of already scarce income. Every US citizen is the heir to our cultural history of tremendous productive capacity handed down to us by our ancestors. This heritage is currently stolen from us by the creators and alleged owners of credit the private banks and the system they have hypnotized everyone with over the years. As the economy becomes more capital intensive and less labor intensive the costs of maintaining such a system become monetarily impossible and absurd. The only valid economic way this problem can be resolved is a universal and equal distribution of money IN ADDITION TO WHATEVER ONE MAKES VIA WORK FOR PAY. And as businesses will almost inevitably raise their prices as they see such new demand becoming available implementing a discount to prices by retail merchants of whatever product AFTER THEY HAVE DETERMINED THEIR BEST, COMPETITIVE PRICE, eliminates any inflation and can actually be utilized to create price deflation, AS EVERY CENT OF THOSE DISCOUNTS UNDER SUCH A PROGRAM WOULD BE REBATED BACK TO THOSE MERCHANTS SO THEY COULD BE WHOLE ON THEIR MARGINS AND OVERHEADS. Such inheritance and Gifting policies fit seamlessly within profit making systems and in fact enable modern high tech profit making economies to survive the increasingly trapped and impossible situation they find themselves in and that will inevitably result in either a vulgar fascism or socialism.
Please try to think about these matters, so that you don’t unconsciously bring about the historical political vices mentioned above. If you want profit making systems to survive and thrive you will recognize that monetary Distributism is the modern and logical answer.
wisdomicsblog.com
Tony do not waste your time with chdwr he has trolled his wisdom here for years and always changes his name because most of us know his wisdom is crock. Welfare is already in place chdwr just wants to never work a day in his life and get it all without putting forth any effort at all and we are all the same.
What he forget and has always forgot is people will never be equal in his utopia. But he think handing out freebies to all will solve everything.
Yes Tony don’t bother to think a new thought after all circumstances never change and we are after all living in the best possible circumstances possible. Never mind that the monopoly business model of finance dominates every other business model and nearly every individual in the economy, after all it means nothing that such a glaring monopolistic inconsistency like that exists in what is an alleged free market economy. Monopoly ideas/paradigms like loan only don’t matter as the economy becomes increasingly capital intensive and labor becomes less and less of a factor in production. No flaw in economic theory there, just move along, nothing to see and ignore the financier pulling all the levers behind the curtain. Soldier on with Old Guy’s HABITUALLY ORTHODOX, ESTABLISHMENT, NON-LOOKING, NON-EMPIRICAL OPINIONS. The fact that long economic downturns rhyme with wars means nothing to you, your family, your grand children or the rest of humanity and civilization, especially since in the next war no one’s life or productive capacity is safe. Yeah, I’m just an idiot utopian who wants to free individuals to BOTH work AND have at least a middle class level of income, who wants to save profit making systems from the collapse and likely vulgar fascism or socialism that a dominating Financial paradigm obviously and inevitably are taking us.
“The only valid economic way this problem can be resolved is a universal and equal distribution of money IN ADDITION TO WHATEVER ONE MAKES VIA WORK FOR PAY”
Quit with the NONSENSE.
Who is going to pay for it (ie: taxed)?
If you are talking about conjuring up $$s out of thin air … that is blatant printing (and, no, QE is NOT “printing”) leading to currency ruination.
There is a continual and increasing scarcity of individual incomes being produced in ratio to costs/prices. Thus monetary Gifting is the only solution. Free your mind from outmoded monetary thinking and pay attention to people like Steve Keen, Ellen Brown and especially myself who has integrated money systems and economic theory under the concept that even Keen and Brown still have a relatively murky and unconscious notion of. My book “Wisdomics/Gracenomics: The New Economic and Monetary Theory For Modern Economies will soon be available.
wisdomicsblog.com
“Thus monetary Gifting is the only solution.”
You still haven’t stated source of $$s.
If you are printing, everyone will dump currency.
If you are taxing, owners of capital will flee.
Then what?
The source is a sovereign national agency whose mandated policies fill the gap between total individual incomes and total costs/prices thus making economic equilibrium a reality it cannot possibly be at present, and whose combined policies are the very definition and enactment of equilibrium, individual freedom and systemic free flowingness. A = A. Freedom and free flowingness is freedom and free flowingness.
Tax?
Printing?
One word.
One word only.
Costless Distribution….that fills the gap between incomes and costs/prices simultaneously produced. You can see it if you look at it…instead of refusing to look.
To distribute something there has to be something to distribute. So I think you are talking redistribution instead, unless you are the generous type who has a warehouse full of wealth. Save us the trouble and just note down the address… you needn’t lock the door, the distribution process will happen effortlessly. Thank you, and I hope your idea works out for us all.
Signed,
People.
No, I’m talking direct distribution to the individual of a monthly dividend payment created ex nihilo by a federal agency with such specific mandated policies. Same with the discount policy. Thats money to purchase production, not production as a gift. Anyone who thinks we couldn’t match production to the increased income isn’t looking at things very closely or honestly.
There IS A SCARCITY OF INDIVIDUAL INCOMES, NOT PRODUCTICE CAPABILITY. The discount mechanism eliminates inflation and can even be used to create the holy (but without the discount unachievable) goal of price deflation in a profit making system. These policies are the salvation of profit making systems in high tech modern economies. You just have to look past a lot of your conditioning and prior false doctrines….that’s all.
“…monetary Gifting…”
Whatever the source of the ‘monetary gifting’, handing (or loaning) people money to buy something enables the sellers of that something to raise prices and salaries. That is precisely what has happened with college textbook and tuition prices over the past 40 years with Pell grants and student loans. Textbook prices, tuition prices, etc. have continually gone up faster than the CPI. Take away the Pell grants, student loans and other ‘monetary gifting’ and prices will drop.
You apparently didn’t read my policy of a rebated discount provided by retail merchants, or perhaps did not comprehend its workability and elimination of inflation.
“If the same practice applied to restaurants, the poor would eat Filet Mignon at fancy restaurants for free, while the middle class would pay $200 and the wealthy $2,000 for the same meal.”
What is the senior discount, these days?
The big problem is that everyone has a special interest or more. Politic in Iowa, better support ethanol, with all those corn farmers. Politic in New York, better support all those Wall Street bankers. Every politician is buying votes and soliciting campaign funds.
The republicans love to deregulate, but what winds up happening is that they hand the keys to the chicken coop, over to the foxes. The foxes raid the coop. Then the republicans get booted out and the democrats sweep in and create onerous re-regulations like Dodd-Frank and more social spending programs, after what the foxes did to the coop.
And the political party sycophants cheer this on. Both parties are playing their own game of rape and pillage. Meanwhile, nothing is really fixed.
Rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
We’re going to see a whirlwind of change after this election…
Most people don’t realize the degree to which fedgov has subsidized entire industries, higher education being perhaps the most blatant/crippled. Dozens if not hundreds of schools would be closing right now if not for the economic “stimulus” package that was diverted from infrastructure and sent to public sector unions/institutions instead. Same goes for post offices, municipal services/local govt. – all of these bloated bureaucracies are doomed when the next president sees the books/numbers.
The great contraction in traditional US higher ed capacity will begin in 2017, and the past 8 years will be exposed as a shameful fraud paid for by $8-10trillion of debt, all while the domestic economy completed it’s transition to part-time purgatory. The US sacrificed it’s potential for recovery to preserve the ‘legacy’ of a divisive & grossly underachieving president. An economy destroyed + entire generation of debt serfs for the sake of one man’s ego.
And people wonder why Trump is popular…?
Yes, likely all true.
Nothing wrong with merit-based scholarships — they will not bankrupt anyone and bring fresh blood and perspectives to “elite” institutions, bringing a lot of benefit to the isolated less-wealthy and the isolated more-wealthy. And they study like crazy, knowing it is everything or nothing.
One of the things that have suffered an enormous inflation is the quality of education and the credentials handed out. Social mobility is also hampered enormously by the multiplication (inflation) of irrelevant credentials required to get a job.
There are very few jobs that you can get simply by offering to show up and do them for free for a week or a month to prove you’re an asset. This should be the norm instead of the exception.
Merit based scholarships and income based scholarships are 2 different things
Ask Mish who paid for his college education.
I earned my way through college for about three years, primarily by playing poker. Parents helped out at the end. Back then it was doable. Tuition at the University of Illinois was something like $250 a semester.
I am a pretty good poker player. A big win of $100 was a huge chunk of tuition. Room and board was the big expense back then.
Mish
Mish, I went to college in the mid 70’s. My guess is that you attended the University of Illinois in the early 70’s. I lived at home and went to school. I had a very good paying job and struggled to pay tuition, books, car insurance, car repairs, healthcare, gasoline, income tax and the occasional lunch at the college cafeteria. There is no way I could have afforded room and board. If I hadn’t lived close to school, I would not have been able to attend college. My point is circumstance does play a part in results.
There is nothing wrong with merit-based scholarships — they will not bankrupt anyone and bring fresh blood and perspectives to “elite” institutions, bringing a lot of benefit to the isolated less-wealthy and the isolated more-wealthy. And they study like crazy, knowing it is everything or nothing.
One of the things that have suffered an enormous inflation is the quality of education and the credentials handed out. Social mobility is also hampered enormously by the multiplication (inflation) of irrelevant credentials required to get a job.
There are very few jobs that you can get simply by offering to show up and do them for free for a week or a month to prove you’re an asset. This should be the norm instead of the exception.
“And they study like crazy, knowing it is everything or nothing.”
Not always. Many lower and middle class students blow their scholarships and flunk out.
Most degrees are becoming essentially valueless to workers. Free online education only requires accreditation for obtaining a degree. A onetime examine offered through an accredited body with a onetime cost would address a lot of issues.
Laughable. Mish, who paid for your college education?
As I explained, I did.
Were it not for Public unions and government policies driving up the costs beyond belief, one could do the same today. The student loan program was purposely designed to make students debt slaves. As icing on the cake, Bush came along and passed a bill making student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
Unions, Republicans, Democrats, and students themselves all contributed to the mess. The key point is whenever unions and politicians get involved, costs soar.
So Jim “Hammer” there’s your non-laughable answer.
Mish
Mish I like you put myself thru college. Yes in the late 60’s and 70’s. No help from mom or pop. I worked and worked to get there. Bush really screwed our education system up to be honest. No Child Left Behind is another screw up. This is apart of the problem as well. Everyone must now pass, we cannot hold them back, and everyone is a winner is the biggest crock of do-do in history.
The price for a college degree continue to rise well above inflation because of Bush’s policy of making student loans non-dischargeable and nothing more. The Fed carries this 1.4 trillion dollar bubble as an asset on their balance sheet. I think it would be a liability.
“As icing on the cake, Bush came along and passed a bill making student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.”
As Martin Armstrong and others have pointed out, it was Clinton who made student loan debt non dischargeable in bankruptcy.
Why not just put a chip in the students brain? There’s no sense in any type of human contact in education. It will be much easier for the Feds to propagandize the entire system with online courses. No need for critical thinking, just believe what you’re told.
*IS* inexpensive online education the future?
Today I replaced the steel drain to our double-bowl kitchen sink.
I went to the hardware store: all they had was plastic. It still wasn’t all that cheap. I got it. The plastic drain was so cut-rate that before it sealed, the female coupler warped and stripped. I went back, got another, with some extra parts. Same story. I went back, got two more… but didn’t tighten it to sealing. Instead, I siliconed the daylights out of it.
I spent better than forty dollars, and all day on what should have been a two hour job. The company, by replacing steel with plastic, and charging close to the same price, increased its profits threefold. By going with too little plastic, it cut its costs ten percent, and increased its sales another threefold.
Ten times the profit! Think about it!
Now, back to your online university. I’m betting that the future is that university will be approximately the same price, online, and won’t teach you a thing.
That’s what you get when you buy Chinese made crap. The Chinese are clever rascals; they sell us crap that fails right away and then we buy more from them.
College degrees are way over-rated. I know many people who have one that have not been successful at all. I can also make a long list of people who never got a degree (myself included) that are very successful. Nothing wrong with going to college and for some professions it is absolutely necessary (doctors), but some people are just wasting their time & money there.
Right, because all you need is a Coursera course on coding and you’re all set right? The job opportunities are there for all right? Nothing to do with social status or other types of status right? Isn’t it odd that the majority of employees at places like Google and Facebook went to top schools? Isn’t it weird that recruiters for these companies use those types of credentials to pattern match when looking for people. They’re not alone. This libertarian wet dream that all it takes is hard work and that everyone has access to opportunity is complete and total ignorance. I once bought into that nonsense. But now I find myself incredibly overqualified, skilled, with a resume full of accomplishments, unable to land gainful employment in a role that’s commensurate with my experience. I’m watching as less qualified minorities and others that went to the right schools or worked at the right companies are picked over me for roles where I would run circles around them.
The reality of social mobility is a farce for all but a lucky few and no matter how much education you dish out or delude yourself into the story that anyone not successful just isn’t working hard enough is B.S. Just watch. There’ll be no work to be done within 10 shorts years. There’ll be mass riots, and in the end we’re going to have that dirty word you all so desperately hate… socialism.
All the gains in the last 40 years have gone to the 1%. Damn right it’s time for some redistribution because to anyone but the most blind the odds of upward mobility are approaching zero.
Long time reader Mish and I used to be a “libertarian” before I realized how fundamentally flawed the logic behind it is.
All so true Bob, except for the inevitable socialism. Monetary Distributism is the workable and much more ethical salvation of profit making systems. It is neither socialism nor capitalism, it is a third much more unified system.
Lol so reader Mary is now envious of the poor, and wants to strip them of one of the few privileges that the capitalist structure affords them.
As for the solution, it is obvious: free (tax-funded) public education, with nominal fees depending on the level of income.
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