This idea is not really new - the California Master Plan for Education essentially promised a free higher education to everyone in California. In 1960. [1]
As these things go, the plan was eroded over time, with the (in)famous Proposition 13 of 1978 dealing a big blow.
There is this meme that Prop 13 is responsible for everything bad in California because of course we could pay for anything if we had more money. In reality the CA budget has grown faster than inflation for decades. https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-...
My personal opinion, the first thing we should do is a complete ban on all “professional” and/or spectator sport in any and all educational institution.
You can still have classes teaching sports but no spectators and definitely no “college spirit” nonsense.
It doesn’t matter to me if these sports generate more revenue than it costs.
It is a distraction that we don’t need.
If people want to participate in spectator sport, there are other places for it.
My justification is the same as that Google uses to kill projects.
There might be a project at Google that makes a hundred million dollars of “pure profit”. However, if it takes even equivalent of a month of time and attention of the executive leadership team and the board every year, it is decidedly not worth doing and must be scrapped.
Similarly, it doesn’t matter to me how much money sports and other such distractions make. If it takes time and attention of the management and or the board of regents, it must be scrapped.
Educational institutions exist for education.
Cut it all out!
Yeah, disagree. College sports generate a significant amount of revenue for the university, which funds scholarships for a huge number of students that otherwise couldn't afford to go there. They have the added benefit of being fun and add entertainment to the college experience.
> Yeah, disagree. College sports generate a significant amount of revenue for the university, which funds scholarships for a huge number of students that otherwise couldn't afford to go there.
This is objectively false for the small college I went to… in any case, you ignored my whole comment, even if it does make money, I don’t want it because this money corrupts beyond just the one university. It changes expectation for all colleges and universities. Now my NCAA division 3 college has to go to donors and beg for flood lights for the football stadium. This is time the UA people could spend on begging for dorms or chemistry lab equipments.
What if the schools discover other sources of revenue? The extreme conclusion being $corp University where more students can afford to go there but the main point of the school becomes slinging $corp products. Product could be ads, iphones, high end sex work, drugs, or anything with decent margins.
Outside of the USA the point of university is education. Only in the USA have I seen the meme that the point of universities is something other than education. I’m still trying to work out how and why there is a difference. Can you help me understand what the point is if it isn’t education?
In the EU, universities rarely have sports leagues you’re right in that, but all universities have various kinds of organised clubs and events all the damn time — not a week goes past without a lot of extra-curricular activities, of course voluntary.
I have no idea how they handle things in say China, but at least here it’s quite obvious that the point of university is more or less to prepare students for life in general rather than just get educated. Education is of course the grand goal and at least here in Finland universities get some significant amount of money from the government for each graduating student, but your first sentence is still dishonest argumentation at best.
Besides, the GP is talking total nonsense in general. Everyone I know outside the US looks up to your college sports scene in admiration since it looks like an awful lot of fulfilment and fun on top of studies and produces a massive amount of successful athletes in all kinds of sports. We’re envious of it, nothing more. Your country is and has been home to the most innovations and set a positive example to the rest of the world for decades and decades now, and frankly saying otherwise is just silly.
There are university leagues for every kind of sport in the UK. Most of the people involved take it very seriously but it's still just a form of recreation and doesn't attract crowds and money. I've never spoken with anyone who admires or envies the US system. If it came up in conversation I suppose most would find it utterly bizarre and likely to corrupt the purpose of a university, as I do.
> In the EU, universities rarely have sports leagues you’re right in that, but all universities have various kinds of organised clubs
I don't think that's true? It's just that they're not a huge public thing, televised, random locals watching live, with people attending the 'college' purely to play for the team, studying as a technicality. The only people involved, generally, are those playing (self-organised).
I played ice hockey in the UK university league (which was at the time in the EU, but I'm not nitpicking that point) and the team occasionally travelled abroad (I went to Eindhoven, NL) to play other university teams in Europe. (And get absolutely thrashed: hockey's bigger in much of Europe, especially colder countries, than it is in the UK, so they were the cream of a big pool of talent, while we were ..scraping a team together from interested parties is only slightly an exaggeration.)
Once upon a time, I was pretty involved with Finnish student organizations. It's more accurate to say that Finnish universities don't have that many organized clubs. It's the students who have them. Students often have a lot of free time, and they get involved in all kinds of activities. Their clubs tend to be independent legal entities with minimal formal connections to the university. Some of the more successful ones I knew often had some trouble maintaining >50% students in their membership in order to qualify for various benefits from the student union.
Second, according to Finnish law,
> The mission of the universities is to promote independent academic research as well as academic and artistic education, to provide research-based higher education and to educate students to serve their country and humanity at large.
It has been argued that getting involved in volunteer activities is part of the education. Participating in college sports would qualify, while watching them and supporting your team would not.
> Besides, the GP is talking total nonsense in general.
I know what I am saying.
The whole point is spiraling costs and tragedy of the commons.
Colleges and universities must keep spending on spectator sports because otherwise you can’t pull students away from other colleges and universities that do the same.
The whole point of my comment is to make college accessible and affordable.
You can’t just say “don’t look up”.
Something has to change.
Socializing, learning to live with others, providing opportunities to join social and professional clubs/organizations, navigation of longer-timeline projects and assignments, etc.
You could call all of these 'education' but the usual and implicit image of education in people's minds is lectures and tutoring sessions so it's worth highlighting these other aspects. All of these are present in universities around the world in varying degrees.
> Socializing, learning to live with others, providing opportunities to join social and professional clubs/organizations, navigation of longer-timeline projects and assignments, etc.
These are all things that happen in universities, but they are also all things that young people have the opportunity to do outside of university.
Technically, narrowly, yes, fine, but having environments that foster those things is much better than living in a desert and having to build those communities yourselves. Many will not have the "opportunity" in the latter case because there's a million other things that come up all the time. It's about reducing friction in accessing those benefits.
The old adage comes to mind: "you loved your college years because you lived in a socialized infrastructure with walkable neighborhoods and the opportunities for spontaneously meeting old friends and new people alike".
>young people have the opportunity to do [this] outside of university
Same goes for computer science and like every humanities degree - you can become an autodidact in any subject that does not require expebsive equiment and facilities.
On the contrary, > 60% of most people's lifelong friends consist of people they met at school or university. That suggests we are not very good at connecting eith random people we meet on the street.
Definately, debating, fencing and politics of student councill all belong in university.
But is a highly-commercial sport appropriate.
My understanding is that these studenta do sport instead of studying. They basically get a degree instead of cash compensation. This seems both corrupting education and exploiting the students.
If you think that's okay, why is this approach not applied to Formula Student?
It has engineering students build racecars and compete. If a graduate in mechanical engineering buildz a winning racecar, thats a hood indicator of conpetence. A winner in football is an indicator of.. anything?
I’ve seen people point to prop 13 as a cause of the budget deficits. Not sure how much any of this goes beyond hearsay, but it is much harder to run a deficit when your tax base is decentralized and fixed. The core idea of prop 13 was to cut income and let spending figure itself out separately. The widening budget deficits in CA happen in the aftermath but maybe that was just the consequence of the same fiscal irresponsibility that motivated the tax cut.
Writing as someone who actually live and voted in California in 1978, the core idea was that seniors were being forced to sell their homes because real estate values and taxes were rising faster than their fixed incomes could support.
The Jarvis Foundation promoted it as a cost containment measure after the measure had been qualified for the ballot.
The majority of voters were homeowners back then. It was created and passed to benefit homeowners and preserve existing communities. But the bigger issue is that there was a flavor of magical thinking among conservatives that cutting taxes would cut spending (starve the beast). Naturally one proved more popular than the other with the electorate.
I’m gonna say you haven’t looked into how that money can be spent. About half goes into the school and rainy day fund, the stimulus checks were required by law for I think 16? So your question is “what did they do with 34B” which again… pretty easy to figure out. There’s a budget.
That link also has the allocations for that 38b. You can get 5Gb fiber in my neighborhood now. Some of that is probably due to this budget for instance.
Prop 13 drives real estate prices up and rents while they lag also follow. And that drives the price of labor up as well. Even more malign it discourages muni's from approving housing because the property taxes don't cover the services that muni's have to pay for.
This is the real reason manufacturing is leaving the West, not regulation and not evil plan by China. This is also the real reason for culture of thowing away things and not repairing -> a new dishwasher costs £300, but a mechanic needs to charge £100 an hour to pay rent.
If you rent is 50% of your income, the rent is actuslly 75% of your income -> because when you pay for anything, say get a plumber, 50% of your money goes to pay the plumber's rent. If, hypothetically, rents were zero, the plumber would cost twice less. You would have 4 times more money.
But not 100% of your income goes to paying for labour in your local economy. You buy goods and services that are from elsewhere (food from France, entertainment from America) etc.
Prop 13s original beneficiaries were pre-boomer. It was sold as a means to allow grandma to stay in her home as property values skyrocketed around her and rising property taxes were actually pushing (pre-boomer) people out of their longtime homes.
To be fair a lot of California students get a free education. I moved to California as a poor teenager. I became a resident and then had all of my costs (minus housing) covered during both community and state college.
I never thought something like that would be possible for me. It ended up being fairly easy. Moving to California radically changed my life for the better.
I'm an educator, and a social democrat (approximately) so "yes"?
What saddens me is that grand (and simple) plan "free education for all" gets watered down and chipped away to "free education for those who have money or connections" and later attempts to shore it up offten amount to "free education for $special_group". While I don't deny $special_group should get free education, what gets me is all the special-pleading going on.
In OOM programming terms, it's like we had a universal principle which was easy to implement, and this has now been replaced by a bunch of switch/case statements...
I understand and empathize, but you also realize that college in the 60's and in the 2020's are completely different beasts no, right? The genie is out of the lamp, but we literally don't have the room to stuff it back in. CA's population has tripled in 60 years, and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good). There are more students competing for university today than there were people in 60's california.
Thankfully not all of them are trying to apply specifically to UCLA or even in state, but the numbers are staggering.
Even if teachers have (which I'm not convinced of to begin with), Universities and land haven't. Its no secret that we've had an overpopulation crisis for the past few decades as is, so We haven't fully solved that issue as of now.
And I'm equally unsure if taxes have tripled, between increasing poverty on the bottom and more and more tax evasion on top.
I'm sure if we built new universities, there would be plenty of applicants to teach it in, given how fierce the competition for academic positions already is.
If capacity at existing colleges is the problem, we could start new ones.
Where exactly would you propose building them? A competitive university is going to require around 2,000 acres of land. Where are you going to find that in today's California? No doubt there is plenty of open space left, but it's not in very desirable areas.
Assuming you’re using “overpopulation” to refer to California’s housing shortage, this is not a “too many people” issue or a “not enough land issue”, but rather a “land isn’t being used efficiently” issue. Efficiently housing and moving large numbers of people is by and large a solved problem, with plenty of examples to learn from (see: any megacity in Asia).
California hasn’t solved the issue because some percentage of residents or other interest groups don’t want to solve the issue and have had the political means to block attempts at resolution.
> and so has the tax base and # of teachers. This is a non-issue. Society scales.
The tax base and the number of higher education instructors may indeed have tripled. I'd have to check. But that would only be enough if you were going to teach the same fraction as went to college in 1960. What was that, 10 or 15%?
So we'd need something like a x30 increase in teachers. And even more in tax base (since we're building more campuses or enlarging the existing, not merely funding the existing ones).
Somewhat unrelated, but several states have seen unexpected growth since that time period
Kind of hard to believe, but in 1950 Florida and Kentucky had about the same population. Since then Florida has 8x'ed (I think because of modern AC). Other states (especially in the south and southwest) have seen similar levels of growth to CA. I don't see how the problem you mentioned is specific to California
A few loosely coupled thoughts on the subject - mostly to flesh out my own thinking
(tldr - in which I conclude that we agree on the goal but disagree on “which was easy to implement”, after thinking through my own educational / economical history at some length ;))
I benefited from:
* a nearly free and (luckily) high quality school education from kindergarten through 12th grade - most schools were not that great in my time, I lucked out (with parents who strived / persisted until they got me into the right one)
* a nearly free but terrible education for my bachelors in engineering in India
* a largely discounted and excellent post-graduate education in the US, paid for by my work as a research assistant, which I had to compete for, and that paid the equivalent of $375/month after taxes for working 20 hours a week with a full course load from which I paid my living expenses (in the early oughts - so i was poor :)), but came with a tuition waiver.
Here’s how it has led me to approach this subject:
* I definitely agree that the ideal of nearly free education for everyone that wants it is the right one for a richer society like America to strive for, but subject to some basic rules(eg maintain non-abysmal grades that reflect at least basic effort)
* Free just means someone else is paying for it - and that has its limits. In a free / subsidized college world, major states in India had (have?) so few engineering colleges that if you got less than 99%, you couldn’t study technology - at all! Barring a stroke of luck (family moving to another state where I at least got into a pretty bad engineering college) , I would have had to study economics instead of engineering.
* Around the time of the article above (maybe a few years before) India started allowing private colleges to charge more. This has made education a lot more expensive in India on average, although I believe a similar number of “free seats” still exist, but the number of “seats” to study popular fields has gone up by on order of magnitude, and that has enabled a LOT more people to study what they want, but incomes have grown a lot too for white collar workers. For many (not all) fields, folks are able to take a loan and pay it back.
* If, for instance, the US government paid for just “degree granting post-secondary institutions” expenses, it would instantly become the #2 budget category just below social security and above health, medicare, “income security” and defense.
* It seems that 65% of US adults over 25 do not have a bachelors degree. It seems likely many of them will not support using their tax dollars to create a new #2 budget liability - despite the “chicken-or-egg” dynamic - that if the education was free, many of them would have a degree, and might support it.
I'm approximately a social democrat too, but I'm also a pragmatist. Asking for "free education" is like a child asking for a pony. Education, like everything, costs money, and we can't just wave a magic wand and change that. The only question is who pays for it: the student, or someone else. "Free education" really means education paid for by society at large rather than students. I'm not saying that's a bad idea. It isn't. In fact, it's a really good idea. But I really wish we'd stop calling it something that it's not.
"social democrat" - are you sure? the point remains: some services are social goods and should be treated as such, so that "nobody lacks for inability to pay". That's not literally "free" but has the same meaning in practice.
> some services are social goods and should be treated as such
I'm not disputing that. I'm just taking issue with the marketing strategy. I don't like selling it as "free education" because that's a lie, and I don't like lying because it catches up with you eventually. I think it should be called what it is: government-subsidized education. (I also think it should be means-tested. I see no reason for society to pick up the tab for rich people's kids.)
Should we call all grocery stores 'government subsidized food stores' since American AG receives a huge amount of government subsidies? Gas stations 'government subsidized gas stations' or maybe 'government owned' since a large amount of US oilfields are on US government owned land via leases? Should anything that is government subsidized should have some pejorative prefix added to it or just free education?
>"Free education" really means education paid for by society at large rather than students. I'm not saying that's a bad idea. It isn't. In fact, it's a really good idea.
Like, he's no longer allowed to be a social democrat if he understands bsaic economics? Why am I not surprised?
> some services are social goods and should be treated as such,
Perhaps. But how is higher education that? It's true that not as many people as you would like have 4 year degrees, but many do, and those people serve me overpriced coffees while whining about unionization.
Where is the social good in their degrees? Like, even if they had gotten those for free and there was no student debt, how did their degrees help either society at large, or them personally?
It is apparently very easy for this to not be a social good.
That's not how the language works. We have long ago decided that "free", when used in the context of social services, is correct enough to be understood.
Do you think that definition is bad? If so, maybe you'll catch more nibbles by trying to engage in a dialog?
That is incorrect. Social services are “free”, adhering to the legal and traditional definitions in that the entity offering the service is indeed not charging for the service. That is well understood.
It is also understood that the source of funding for institutions which offer free services is taxes, fees, and levies from the general population. Regardless of what MMT proponents imagine, costs will eventually be repaid by resources, labor, or war.
I find it intellectually dishonest to advocate for “free” services without acknowledging how those services are funded. It does seem more of the population is interested in immediate gratification regardless of long term costs (see deficit spending, consumer debt, etc.), but that doesn’t make the cost disappear because it is ignored. It’s no different than suggesting because birds fly, they must not be affected by gravity.
I've seen a lot of terms used for social services: subsidized, covered, available by grant, available to those who qualify.
But I don't always see those social services tossing around the word "free".
Sure, sometimes there are "free haircuts for the homeless" or "free medical services for the needy", or "free help to apply for benefits", but generally in the context of entitlements, we're not freely bandying this word around.
Well of course voters accept this vernacular, slang usage! It works great! March into the principal's office, slam your fist down on the desk, and demand your free public schools for your kid. Stagger into the E.R., slam your fist down on the triage nurse's desk, and demand your free health care!
It works great at the ballot box too! "Vote now for your free stuff! Everybody gets more free stuff when they vote for me! Support the bill for free stuff!" Because if you called it "using other people's money", then the Ghost of Margaret Thatcher would arise and invade Puerto Rico.
While you're voting, consider whether you're in that hacker demographic that gets a chuckle out of the meme that says "The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer."
"Taxpayer funded" is a gross oversimplification, for any sort of government entitlement and college funding alike.
But anyway, I have seen students in college who were sent there by their employer. They work full-time, have families with young children, and they were expected to pick up several credit-hours to upskill. You've never seen a bunch of sleepier guys. A lot of people, sent by their employer picking up the tab, don't wanna be there, and it shows. They're really disengaged with the class, and that frustrates classmates and professor alike.
Then there's students whose parents paid for it, and family expectations on them finishing college so they get a "real job", or even support the parents and buy them a nice house soon.
Students who work their way through school adopt another distinct attitude. They will get tired too, but they make every credit-hour count. It's their own money and their own blood, sweat, and tears that bring them to the finish line.
There are students who apply for scholarships and get through college that way. There's all sorts of funding for scholarships: corporate sponsors, non-profits, churches, community-based organizations, philanthropic foundations. Someone came to speak at the fraternity meeting and she said she'd been awarded six million dollars in scholarships. I was unsure how you'd spend all that at a community college, but hey?
People who are spending, or supported by, other people's money spend it differently than if it were their own money in their own bank account with them watching the bills and transactions. The incentives are different. The risk/reward calculation is different. That's how it goes.
I’m really not trying to argue in bad faith. Many conversations about “free” social services ignore real capital and human cost of the proposal as if it doesn’t exist. Why stop at education when basic needs like food, water, and shelter could all be “free”? The cost of residential water in CA, for example, is about an ⅛th of the education budget.
In the case of covered education for foster kids, I’m conflicted. I’m in favor of providing anyone placed in the foster care system resources to offset their hardship. I would support non-profits that showed they could efficiently direct funding to programs to help foster kids go to college. I would wager there is research that shows positive economic and social impact by sending foster kids to college that outweighs the cost and significantly reduces the risk of foster to prison. But that’s my choice and don’t think everyone else should be forced to have the same convictions.
While not perfect, Arizona exposes this somewhat by offering tax credits for contributions to non-profits in certain categories (aid for working poor, tuition assistance, foster/adoption, public schools). I’m still forced to cover the cost of social programs, but minimally I get have some agency in choosing organizations that align with my philosophy in those domains and aren’t kicking back a slice of that money to politicians.
> Many conversations about “free” social services ignore real capital and human cost of the proposal
Many compalins ignore the costs of missing these services.
We have 'free' firefighters because entire cities used to burn to the ground. That's very expensive to rebuild.
We have 'free' sanitation becauae The Black Death did more economic damage than both world wars combined.
We have free school education because having a population that can't read and write is economically ruinous. And politically ruinous - illiterate people can vote, join cults, maybe they support the inquisition and burning witches at the stake. We've been thought that.
No-one i ever met believes we should go back to the times where majority couldn't read and write becauae parents could not afford school. Some just believe that education stops at an arbitrary age.
Education is a prime target for government subsidies because, as a market, it yields positive externalities. This means when a person receives an education, the net benefit is felt by society at large. It's a well-established economic principle.
So if we're going to discuss the economic realities of government subsidies, we should go a bit further than "things cost money," because that's obvious and simplistic.
*Edit: Just want to add that the tax debate is indeed worth having. My point is only that the justification for subsidies is grounded in econ principles, not just the whims of the public.
I'm a leftist, left of democratic socialist and definitely left of social democrat. But can we please not point fingers and question people's motives? If someone says they are X, then we should believe them until there's a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.
Of course! Basically everything is paid by somebody (TANSTAAFL). Nobody thinks that free education is magically free, everybody understands that it's paid by taxes/government/society.
OTOH, it is a much cooler slogan than 'education paid by society at large :)
> Nobody thinks that free education is magically free, everybody understands that it's paid by taxes/government/society.
That is far from clear. There are crazy people on the left just like there are crazy people on the right, and I think some of them really don't understand how the world actually works, and that you really can somehow magically make education "free for everyone".
Even if it's not true, it provides ammunition for the opposition to say that it's true. One way or another, I think using misleading terminology is generally not a net win.
Oh come on. Literally no one believes that teacher salaries are going to pay for themselves.
When leftists say that something like public healthcare would be literally free what they mean is that the net cost compared to the alternative is null or negative, not literally that nothing is being spent.
If you want to give me a link of someone who literally thinks that free college means that no one has to pay anything for the college itself or it's staff, I'm willing to take a look. Otherwise, it's just an argument that the net cost to society is negligible or negative, which is a valid use of the word too.
I don't think they think that no one will pay. I think they don't think about it at all, or they think that government somehow has unlimited resources at its disposal.
It's actually that "billionaires" will somehow produce a whole lot more things and pay for it all for everybody else, absolving themselves of any further rational thought or moral responsibility to those with less than themselves.
Many young people have no concept of money. It's not their fault, their parents paid for everything and it's not really taught. My first car loan out of college floored me at how much the monthly payment was at 60 months and it was a reasonably priced demo (cheaper than new).
Of course, not many people have the concept of money at the government scale either. What does $75B to Ukraine really mean?
The State of New Mexico adopted a policy in 2022 that expands existing state-funded scholarship programs to ensure that undergraduate tuition will be fully covered for all state residents, and fees and housing for most. Depending on how you squint at it, it's probably the first state to have done so. Unfortunately the program does not have guaranteed funding going forward but there is a history of strong political support for state tuition programs and so, with fingers crossed, we can be optimistic that undergraduate debt will be a thing of the past for most students here.
It is perhaps reflective of this state's small size that there has been almost no national news coverage of the change, and even a lot of websites comparing state programs still haven't been updated to include the new changes that significantly expanded eligibility.
New Mexico also makes it relatively easy for students to establish in-state classification after moving into the state for college, so we can expect a number of out-of-state students to take advantage as well.
Middle class families can pay for school: In 2019-20 in state tuition and fees in California averaged $9k. 100% of which you can take a federal loan and payback <$150/mo that begins 6 months after graduating.
Rent/living cost is another matter, but tuition can be still be reasonable if you state in state and don’t attend expense universities.
But I totally agree - there is a lower/lower middle class of people that attending college is vet challenging and free tuition for all at some schools would be massively beneficial for them and society.
Even if you live at home and stay on your parents plan in state tuition is 14k. Add another 2k for books and at a minimum your talking 16k. That's a pretty big chunk if your only at 150k for a family of 4.
If I was to propose something I'd make in state tuition fully free for residents, and if that cost too much maybe make people do the first 2 years at a community college. Honestly I credit community college with turning my life around. I ended up graduating from a state school and I'm very happy with my degree! It's not in computer science, but after a very long journey I feel it's something to be proud of.
The best part about college is your free to take time off and finish later.
That 9k number I bet is averaging community colages with California State and University of california, because 9k is far too low from my two kids recent tuitions.
It's already difficult to attend California's public universities as a state resident; the more popular campuses prefer nonresidents/international students because they pay full price. No-tuition residents will be even less desired by admissions offices.
Admissions data at UC Berkeley shows that nonresident students have historically been ~35% of admits, with 2022 at 28%. UCLA historically has had ~40% nonresident admits, with 2022 at 34%[0]. UCLA’s freshman profile shows that GPA and SAT/ACT scores (from when they were still required) are higher for nonresidents as well[1]. It’s reasonable to argue that resident admit percentage should be higher, but the idea that nonresidents are preferred isn’t supposed by admissions data.
As for the nonresident tuition issue, it seems like a matter of having the state make up the difference between resident and nonresident tuition so that the university receives the same fee regardless of residency status.
Do blue collar workers require healthcare from college educated people? Do they benefit when American industry is competitive on in the international marketplace?
We shouldn’t be leaving people behind but the idea is that we all benefit from an educated workforce.
There’s plenty of arguments to be made over the details but let’s not miss the big picture here.
64% of foster youth graduating high school is far far higher than I thought it would be. I’m beyond delighted by this. And if that 64% has free access to post-secondary… that’s a cycle breaking opportunity.
I'm sure this varies by region, but the standards for graduating HS are fairly low where I am in California. Granted doing even basic things with the level of trauma many foster kids have is an impressive feat.
The question to ask is "how many kids graduate high school vs. how many should".
Turns out the answer is interesting - about 50 years ago, the graduation rate for high school was around 50%. These days it's much higher (90% or more in some areas).
Does this mean the children is learning? Perhaps.
It also may represent a failure of our systems - in the past, not everyone needed a high school degree to be a functional member of society, and forcing those people to "graduate" may in fact be a net loss to society.
In other countries, this is explicit: people are tracked to "educational" vs. "vocational" career tracks earlier, and there is not the emphasis on graduation rates as a metric.
> It is amazing how many people complain about "kids these days" while every measurable statistics shows that their generstion was much worse.
> drink less alcohol, commit less crime, get teenage pregnant less often
Stats lie.
Their doctors give them drugs way more fun than alcohol, all of their crimes are unattributable to them because they're being committed in a virtual world where there is no accountability (it's not the Boomers SWATing each other, DDoSing anything that disagrees with them, and running fraudulent crowdfunding grifts), and the decline in teenage pregnancy has more to do with the entire demographic's sexual interests being fine-tuned to bespoke pornography and/or their own reflections.
Number of school shootings only ever increases, and an entire generation claims to be mentally ill. Something is wrong here.
Overall violence committed by kids went down. Simple as that.
Pluuus it was kids who then protested and lobbied against legalized guns. Aaand it was his generation who called them crisis actors and bullied then. And bullied parents of dead kids.
In here, I would point out that SWATing is a thing solely and absolutely because adult cops behave over the top aggressively. SWATing is not a thing in countries with less aggression and violence prone police. Not because their teenagers would be overall better, but because their police forces are harder to be used.
A 50% graduation rate for US secondary education had been attained by the 1947-48 school year, which is now 75 years ago. By 50 years ago (1972-73), the actual rate was 75%, among 17 year olds. (Note that some normal-schedule students would be graduating at age 18, and other statistics look at graduation or G.E.D. equivalent at later ages, e.g., 19 or 20.)
That said, yes, there was a dramatic increase in attendance and graduation from ~1900, when the graduation rate was about 6%.
US Department of Education, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait, p 55, "Table 18 --- High school graduates, by sex and control of institution: 1869--70 to 1991--92"
A hundred years ago graduating high school was rare. My grandfather made it all the way to 6th grade before he had to start working. And if you look at what a high school graduate applying to one of the Ivies was expected to know a century ago, it was considerably closer to today's bachelor's degree than today's high school diploma.
Primary and secondary educational standards have dropped precipitously in the USA.
the high school era in ones' life has a lot of opportunity for personal hardship; in many ways it's the beginning of personal responsibility for a lot of people.
in other words : it's less likely that an elementary school student has to juggle an unwanted pregnancy, an estranged family, and a job at McDonalds; it's not that uncommon later on.
I do get that. I knew people who had a kid, family issues, substance issues, etc and still managed to graduate. I know there are probably others who wouldn't graduate in similar situations or worse ones. It still shocks me that the dropout rate is so high.
As someone who was homeless in high school (but still graduated thanks to some incredible non-familial adults), it's very easy to think, "fuck it, I'm out, I don't need this extra stress". Doing homework is real fucking hard when you don't have anywhere that's home.
I feel shocked too. But not surprised. The shock is more of a reminder that the world for many is so unlike the world for me. It’s so easy to assume everyone has approximately my experience. But it’s just so not true. So many are dealing with such an unfair hand to begin with.
If intelligence is distributed on a bell curve there are going to be some that can't graduate no matter how hard they work, and some more that can only graduate with a lot of hard work. Then throw in some more people that have some difficult life circumstances: parents dying, depression or other health issues, drug or alcohol problems, etc.
This number is including the fact that we already lower standards for those on the left side of the bell curve. It's entirely the difficult life situations at play.
In my experience they just stop attending, not hit a class they can't pass. There is no standard of achievement required to graduate high school besides participation.
I thought this was already a thing. It turns out to be partially covered in 35 states:
> As of 2021, there are 35 states that have some type of statewide postsecondary education tuition waiver or scholarship program for students who have been in foster care.
> 24 states have statewide tuition waivers: Alaska[1], Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, (Dark blue color on the map)
> 4 states have state funded grant programs for students in foster care are: Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia. (Light blue color on the map)
> 7 states have state funded scholarship programs for students in foster care are: Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, and Washington. (Purple color on the map)
> 16 states and the District of Columbia have only the Federal Chafee Educational Training Voucher: Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming (Yellow color on the map)
What I was thinking of was the Chafee Educational Training Voucher, which gives up to a $5000/year reimbursement:
> Students can get up to $5,000 per academic year based on cost of attendance, available funds, the student’s unmet financial need.
> Note: For the federal fiscal year 2022, the voucher’s maximum annual amount was temporarily increased to $12,000. On Oct. 1, 2022, the maximum award will revert to $5,000 per year.
ALL kids in Tennessee can now attend any two year trade school upon graduation from a state high school. Adults can, as well, based on certain additional requirements (that really are easy after you've lived in-state).
The taxpayers must pay for it somehow. Income tax at least equalizes the sacrifice each taxpayer makes (to some degree). How do TN taxpayers pay for it?
I mean, no. it should be state-by-state thing but if all states implement it then great. but it shouldn't be federally mandated. maximizing state autonomy is a good thing.
We have community college + low cost state colleges. CC is almost free, cheap state colleges probably will cause a little debt. Some part time job will probably offset most of this.
Completely free will be abused probably, let’s be honest
We should go back to a California State university system that had capacity for any resident who academically qualified, and was tuition free. This was actually more cost effective than the byzantine money handling administrative policies we have now.
I'll take it, but I wish 16 continuous years of education were not required for basic life success. Germany seems to have a better system where schools teach useful job skills and paid apprenticeships help refine these. Especially for foster youth, it seems important to have some income as well as place in society as soon as possible. Provided they can even get into a college in the first place with limited opportunity to focus on academics.
I’m not opposed to the carbs. I think if they’re in a whole food form, the kids are so much better off than if they’re eating processed… Anything.
Not teaching kids to eat whole foods is one of the greatest assaults on public health we’ve done in the last century, from what I can see. They become adults who normalize eating these perfect addictive meals, who allow their own kids access to the same junk, and then they their own kids as well, and so on. Until today when grocery stores are quite literally predominately food that you shouldn’t eat. You just shouldn’t.
Most common diseases in north America are highly correlated with diet. I find that so profound. We’re all eating ourselves to death in some form or another, it seems. To have that start in a public school is a real affront to individual and social well-being.
We teach kids to eat whole foods, we just don't teach them well.
I remember in school we had a lot of programs for nutrition which were basically health-food propaganda. Yes it was the "Food Pyramid" so not ideal, but there was a clear message to eat minimally-processed foods (fruits, vegetables, dairy, grains) and avoid junk. We watched "Supersize Me" and a documentary which explained all these "vegan / whole foods" diets. But kids still eat junk because they're kids and they don't really understand or care, and everyone around them eats junk; and then grow up and continue to eat junk because it's cheaper/easier and they did as kids.
Also, we had fruits and vegetables in every school lunch, as well as salads and wraps as alternatives to the hot meal. But the fruits were often wilted or bruised, and vegetables canned and/or overcooked. If we had good-tasting healthy food, I'm sure more kids would eat it; but the school lunch was school-lunch quality, and bad quality degrades healthy food more than it does junk food.
The problem is, if we want to teach kids how to eat unprocessed food so that they actually listen, we need nuance and funding. To teach them "healthy <> bad tasting", we need to give them access to good-tasting healthy meals, which are hard to cook. Or if we just keep scaring them into eating less junk, we need to change society so that it's more ingrained that junk food is bad outside of school; right now they get mixed messages, where 1 semester of health class says "junk food bad", but few people care anywhere else. But nuance, funding, and affecting culture are things the government is really bad at, especially when it's an issue as "insignificant" as eating healthy.
We shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. I'd rather see kids get free pizza and hot dogs for school lunch, than I would a system where it costs $8 per student and only some kids get free lunch, but it's 100% vegan fair trade certified healthy food.
Now if you can pull a boiling frog meme and make the pizza be healthy, haha more power to them!
Many schools, especially newer ones, do not have the facilities to cook real meals.
We should definitely encourage schools to renovate and make use of the kitchens when they have them, encourage kitchen facilities be included in new construction, and maybe even encourage creative solutions when no other options exist.
Quebec hospitals started cooking all their food internally on the same budget.
More and more French municipalities stopped their frozen food subscription to hire a handful of cooks and gardeners with a similar budgets. ( those are minimum wages jobs than can be sourced locally )
To conclude : human have been cooking food in batch for quiet a while. That what I mean when I say « we forgot » : some communal facilities like school don’t even have kitchen anymore.
We didn't forget. It would just be expensive, and Americans simply don't want their hard-earned tax dollars to pay to feed other people's kids, so schools have to resort to cheap solutions. It took radical activism (mostly by the black community and groups like the black panthers) just to get school lunches to begin with, and Republicans/Conservatives have been trying to tear it down ever since.
I get your US context. That’s a handful. Thanks for providing that ( irony : 0% )
I just want to play devils advocate on the cost :
How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?
We did that for centuries without conserve, fridge and NPK to grow our food.
We now have access to cheap energy ( historically speaking ) and a variety of preservation methods.
That should be considerably easier.
( and in fact i think it is, I’m in Quebec now, public hospitals switched to cook all their food on the same budget as previously frozen crap. A lot of French municipality are doing the same. Basically you have to pay the yearly salary of à cook, some gardener and a CPA to handle what can’t be grow ( 50% )
A frozen hotdog is pretty expensive for what it really is.
Question : how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?
>How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?
Local produce is more expensive, as is cooking from scratch[0]. Another problem is that won't scale. You can't feed millions of kids twice a day every weekday from the local farmers' market.
>how did we do it for millenniums before frozen carbs?
We didn't. Child mortality was higher, populations were smaller, life expectancy was lower and malnutrition and starvation were more common.
Our current population size is the direct result of post-industrial farming and food production making calories easily available to the masses, and all kinds of foods accessible year-round.
But again, the problem isn't modern processed food, which can be perfectly healthy, it's an unwillingness to fund school lunches enough to provide more than cheap, empty calories.
> Our current population size is the direct result of post-industrial farming and food production making calories easily available to the masses, and all kinds of foods accessible year-round.
Absolutely.
Post WW2 food production with NPK intrants and machineries changed how we grow food. ( thanks Bayers ! )
But it’s hardly the sole factor and I would not be surprise if it was not the main driver of multiplication.
Medecine & Basic hygiene also went a long way. As well as the great convenience of bottled energy to move things arounds for cheap.
But I think we talk about a bunch of stuff at once here.
For instance I did not mention biologic produce.
Just … cooking food in a large communal kitchens with large kitchen equipment. The kind where you can cook for 50 people at once.
As opposed to : complex industrial process to build a hot pocket or a frozen breakfast burrito.
One is something most people can be trained to do, and the other needs a team of engineers to design, and another team to build the factory and another to run it.
( watching your vox link )
Oh. Ok. Yeah. I find that part relevant
> But the US government also doesn’t subsidize leafy vegetable crops in the same way it supports wheat, soy, and corn, vital ingredients in a lot of junk food.
I think it says it all. Why is the US government meddling with the market?
I live in the Us as well: We don’t pay the real price of food.
Yeah produce are labors intensive. But a lot of crap food has hidden cost that should be factored in. ( but that’s yet another topic :) )
To summarize, I find it hard to smallow that buying a frozen product that flew to you and is the result of a complex industrial process is cheaper than whatever grow with sunlight, a hour of care a day and some water.
I don't get this. Food is ridiculously cheap when buying/cooking bulk. Cooking in bulk for 500+ students is doable but just needs some dedicated effort, dedicated machinery and investment, and some pre processing that you could certainly outsource to your local community. It's amazingly win win in so many ways.
Interesting, most places I've seen are increasing the food restrictions, including in food brought from home. This is probably something you can address with your district if your state doesn't already some healthy school food law.
My local district restricts what a kid can bring in for thier personal snack during classroom snack time. It has specific types of approved food listed. In some cases, they even restrict what brand of food it is.
Kids don't apply for SNAP. If their parents fail them, children should not be blamed. There's no excuse for governments in the USA to not provide free breakfast and lunch to any child, no questions asked. Not doing so is absolutely a problem with every level of government that fails to do so.
Spending millions on the education of strangers only for them not to learn much because they are hungry over a meal worth $1.50 in state funding. Fiscal "conservative" everyone.
As a taxpayer who funds public schools, I find it acceptable to subsidize the food of those who are struggling, but I do not have any desire to subsidize the ruling elite (who, in many cases, intentionally keep working class pay low). They can pay for their own children's food.
On the other hand we've got the phrase "Programs for the poor become poor" for a reason. Having a program that benefits everyone means that we all can support it out of enlightened self-interest.
We can reduce overhead by providing food for everyone and not putting in place a complex government bureaucracy to carefully approve some people but not others, to give lobbyists a chance to advocate for the benefit of their constituents at the expense of everyone else, etc, etc.
Moreover, if free food is only available to low-income students, having to eat that food can become a symbol of poverty, and some students may feel ashamed to receive it. Making it available to all students, without reservation, avoids that.
People say that, but it’s not like they have a flashing light that says “TIMMY IS POOR AND THIS LUNCH IS FREE,” they just punch their code or swipe their card or whatever and it rings up as free.
> I find it acceptable to subsidize the food of those who are struggling, but I do not have any desire to subsidize the food of those who keep my pay low.
Doesn't the means-testing bureaucracy frequently outweigh any potential savings? Food is cheap. Bureaucrats are not.
The rich are going to be paying the majority of the taxes that fund this. Is it unacceptable that their children be allowed to get a small fraction of the food their parents paid for?
By blanket helping everyone no matter the wealth, you end up helping mostly non-wealthy people.
By helping specifically the poor/not wealthy, you end up with a massive bureaucracy trying to decide who is wealthy enough, and add paperwork on top of poorer people to "request" such benefit.
You shouldn't be a sucker. For the ruling elite, it's an insignificant tax rebate. The overhead of a means-testing system to make sure that people who have been taxed for 50 free lunches don't get one is a waste that wouldn't be tolerated, except for the fact that we know the hurdles of bureaucracy will eliminate most of the people who qualify, bringing down costs by leaving children hungry.
edit: The idea that your tax dollars are going to pay for the universal benefit of someone who pays more taxes than you do is mathematically nonsensical. It's purely a gimmick. It's a shell game with no shells other than innumeracy.
If you have kids yes. If you don't then you could still being paying for some rich kid's food. Still I would have no problem with this since the alternative is to means test which is just wasteful bureaucracy. Plus I am perfectly willing to subsidize the one rich kid so the 10 poor ones can eat.
The solution to this problem (Wealthy elites getting free stuff) is to just ensure they're taxed appropriately. I do not care if the children of the wealthy are receiving free lunches as long as they're paying their fair share of taxes. Chances are, even with California's weird tax system, they are paying more than your typical middle class family.
There is no reason not make it universal. A lot of kids will still bring their own lunches. Teens in high school will choose paid lunch options some of time. The program would probably have a similar cost to SNAP.
Hungry kids don't learn well, so feeding them will lead to a modest increase of academic achievement on average. Academic achievement correlates with higher earnings, thereby paying for the program with their future taxes.
This seems to make sense on the surface, but I'm skeptical about the last part. It seems we're in a race to the bottom and "good" jobs are increasingly scarce. It seems there aren't enough good jobs for the population. Basically, the logic you laid out is probably sound for small marginal changes, but I'm skeptical it would scale well due to the competition and limited resources.
It's much simpler to provide public services to everyone and handle economic inequality through taxation.
Means-tested benefits result in bureaucracy that sometimes costs more than the increase in cost from giving the benefit to everyone would be, they create poverty traps, and they screw over people in atypical situations (i.e. a kid whose parents care so little they can't even be bothered to get the paperwork done that proves their low income status).
In theory I agree with you, but in practice I think means testing does more harm than good. Some parents aren't gonna fill out the paperwork and we shouldn't punish kids for that. It also adds overhead to the programs.
And I don't think the ruling elite's kids are eating free lunch at public schools :)
Adding on to this a bit, if the ruling elite's children did eat the same cafeteria good, I think it would be a net boon for society.
Think of how every family in Finland taking home a newborn baby gets a box of starter supplies. The box doubles as a crib, so most babies, regardless of their parents wealth, spend their first days sleeping in the same cardboard box.
IMO it's cool as shit to start everyone off the same way like that. From what I understand it also helps reduce the sort of stigma that can hurt kids taking advantage of free lunch programs
> but I do not have any desire to subsidize the ruling elite (who, in many cases, intentionally keep working class pay low). They can pay for their own children's food.
I would hope they get taxed more under this regime so it's not really you subsidizing it for them.
What if you thought of it as: perhaps at your income level your taxes fund one kid's meals, and at the elite's income level their taxes fund ten kids' meals? IDK how the actual numbers work, but that would be the gist in a progressive tax system.
The rich will pay far more into the program for free lunches that include their kids than their kids will receive back. And it'll probably make the program more efficient, since there won't be a pointless bureaucracy devoted to making sure there's no one getting free lunches who doesn't deserve those low-quality free lunches (the horror).
Sorry, where's the regressive tax policy? If this is being funded by a graduated income tax (like what most states have, or federal income tax), then it's being funded by a progressive tax.
Bonus points idea. Have a grandparent take up residency in a target out of state area in a cheap apartment a few years ahead of time, just to meet residency requirements. Then at 17 have the grandparent foster the minor. Boom, free college wherever you want.
this, almost inevitable this will be abused. Way too much money at stake for it not to be, I've heard plenty of stories of rich people who bought houses in certain zip codes so their kids get preferential treatment
I'm all for making education more accessible, but why does it have to be one extreme or the other (free or tuition) - if taxpayers are making education free, can't we levy a requirement for the graduate to at least volunteer Peace Corps style? Perhaps the term of volunteering could be inversely proportional to their grade such that someone who drops out early has to volunteer for a longer period of time.
I don't ask my kid to volunteer because he got a chicken pox vaccine, he just gets to not have chicken pox for free. And that's ok.
We can choose to make the next generations lives better than ours, even if we gain no material benefit ourselves. (Though I'd argue that an educated youth does materially benefit the populace.)
Nothing is free. It is estimated that state and local governments spend 9 percent of state and local direct general spending on higher education [1]. One could argue that the opportunity cost of higher education to taxpayers is 9% of their work life.
Agreed. From the JFK mindset of “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country”, I could see a system where a certain level of volunteering (either by the students or their surrogates - parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, etc) might make one eligible for discounted/free tuition.
My comment was targeted at a tertiary education post. That being said, some of my children went to an expensive private K-12 school where the tuition HAD to be supplemented with volunteering at the school (or elsewhere). I felt it was a valuable lesson for all involved. Nothing is free.
For many, foster care is a temporary program with an agency directive at reunification of the family.
I was a foster parent and one kid was briefly in the system due to a clerical issue where the father was not awarded custody after the mother was arrested.
Would that 14 day clerical issue now be awarded with a free education? Cause that system can be easily gamed.
What is the legal status of foster kids with regard to general financial aid? Is their parents' income considered to be $0? Does the government want the parents' income information? (This used to be the norm for non-custodial and estranged parents.)
It feels great to say "California's most vulnerable young people can take agency over their lives by seeking higher education," but how much is this changing? And since we know most high school grads aren't prepared to basic college freshman classes (cough social promotion cough), then how many of these foster kids are really going to benefit, rather than just spinning their wheels before they fail out?
This feels a lot like a big headline that makes people feel good but doesn't actually do much (if anything, or makes things worse).
0 EFC. No info on parents required (FAFSA) and asset information can also be skipped. Anything past community college won't necessarily be covered, though.
About 61% of foster youth in California graduate high school on time. Past 18 things turn into a messy patchwork of semi support, simply successfully transitioning to a point with a high school diploma, a job, and stable housing is a success story. Many are homeless at points, and living on the street is the backup plan if anything goes wrong. (Note: non-CA experience, but Google shows a similar alphabet soup in CA.)
NFYI says about 3-4% of foster youth graduate with a 4 year degree.
Something doesn't need to be perfect to be better. We're talking about 60k kids who will be able to receive an education instead of 4% of that. It won't solve hunger, but for these kids it's a good news.
This is no doubt good.
It is also a strange patch.
I wonder if this could plausibly cause some families to
purposefully get kids placed into foster care 1 or 2 years before
college. Hopefully not. Usually that whole experience is a nightmare.
Letting everyone attend state college for free is the real deal.
To save costs fire 90% of the admin staff.
(I have not done research on the California state specifically but
most colleges have absorbed far too many admin roles.
Then due to cost not done enough to expand the teaching staff)
Where is the support for the middle class? The ones deemed too wealthy for financial aid, but not wealthy enough to actually afford the cost of college?
Just more tax dollars being siphoned away from my family that got zero assistance.
I grew up on welfare in a shit neighborhood, but now I'm an upper middle class engineer. Trust me, poor people need the help. We are all indirectly benefitting from people getting out of poverty.
Unsympathetic take. Lots of people can use help. Just because you're on welfare doesn't necessarily mean your financial position is any worse (especially as a dependant).
I'm not from the US, but here in the UK when I when went to college and university the state would give students several thousand pounds a year for their parents being unemployed. My dad was a postman who used to do delivery driving on the weekend for extra cash for my family. We were poor, although I was deemed "wealthy" enough to be given no help because my dad made around £30,000.
The end result of this was that I basically the poorest person I knew from 16-21 because my friends either had unemployed parents so were given thousands of pounds to spend on laptops and things to help them get through university, or had rich parents who could buy stuff for them.
Because my dad was a postman I ended up having to work two jobs while at university and had to go into my overdraft almost every month.
Looking back now I am grateful for that hellish 5 years since I actually gained a lot of professional experience in tech during that time, but it came at the cost of severe depression and physical exhaustion. I cannot explain how difficult this period of time was for me. It shaped who I am today but I wished daily that my dad was unemployed so I didn't have to go through it.
Once at college I did feel the playing field was even, but you may be missing a lot of context before that. I grew up on welfare with a single mother, in a neighborhood where all of my friends were on welfare with single mothers. Only a handful of my neighborhood friends went to college. NONE of my hometown friends are STEM people. That stuff isn't even close to their radars. It took me years in college to get out of a petty criminal mindset and just be a regular person. I still don't feel like I belong amongst "rich" people (aka middle class).
> NONE of my hometown friends are STEM people. That stuff isn't even close to their radars. It took me years in college to get out of a petty criminal mindset and just be a regular person. I still don't feel like I belong amongst "rich" people (aka middle class).
I relate to this a lot. All of my friends were on welfare growing up. My family were poor, but my dad did work a crappy job.
I guess that's what upset me – growing up I never felt privileged at all. I remember growing up there was a kid on my street who's dad was a builder and who's mum worked in a school and I thought they were super rich because they had two cars lmao... It was just kinda annoying to be punished for my dad having a job as a postman, and arguably me having to work two jobs while trying to get a degree is why I didn't do that great at uni. If I had government support or if my parents were richer I wouldn't have been in that position.
> I still don't feel like I belong amongst "rich" people (aka middle class).
This is something I have written endless comments about here. Trying to emulate being middle class today is very hard for me. I don't know if you find this, but middle class people are so polite and so well spoken compared to what I'm used to. They're also very sensitive and have a different sense of humour to what comes naturally to me. That often makes it difficult to fit in. Also trying to talk about my personal life is nearly impossible because middle class people don't have a good understanding of drug abuse and criminality.
Super cool that you broke the cycle and are doing well though man!
The cost of post secondary education is untenable.
Post secondaries are quite overpriced. Community / state colleges are usually priced better.
Can you give an example of a college that you are priced out of?
The increasing gap between graduates and the non market because the rate of change in the world is outpacing the rate of change in curriculum to keep up in post secondaries is an opportunity.
Effective allocation of public funds and ensuring there is value received for the public purse is something that needs to be taken up by the average person to learn about and to ask informed questions about.
It sucks when tax dollars that weren’t going to me in the first place continue to not go to me. It’s like nobody wants to discuss how people getting things is the same as the government taking away things I never had!
It was already nearly free; tuition was covered, and a patchwork of benefits covered most of room, board, and books. Or at least that's what they told us when we became foster parents 14 years ago.
What people are failing to understand with this is that this is target people who are foster and don't have a financial supporter.
I see people talk bad and stuff about how this shouldn't be. However those with parents usually have some sort of financial support.
It does suck it is free-free, because it doesn't teach the foster kid important life lessons, but there is more merit to this.
I still think the kid has to pass the accepting test and I think this is the case. If the kid does well, passed the acceptance test they are clear to learn.
Foster kids are not adopted kids, you can adopt but that makes them your kid. Foster kids have sponsor dads and moms.
Colleges are not Universities and often are for profit. Universities are also for profit in the United States, and I would love it if US had a free tier University for all. That won't happen because of US government.
My parents are low middle class. We didn’t qualify for any financial aid and they were tasked with trying to find a way to send both my sister and I to college which they couldn’t afford.
So what did we do? Take out a bunch of loans. Good thing I got a decent job that can pay for them. Too bad for my sister who had a masters and is making $35k as a teacher in Tennessee which is barely more than minimum wage.
And those loans should be forgiven. Is this your position on anything becoming easier over time? "We shouldn't have ramps, my grandpa had to push grandma's wheelchair up the steps"?
Are you saying that under current law the loans should be forgiven, or that we should have laws under which those loans are forgiven?
I believe it's possible to have loans forgiven if you work in certain industries (like public school teaching) for enough years, but it's not a few years — more like a decade or two.
If you think someone who gets a masters shouldn't have to pay back their loans, I'd counter that such a policy would be a wealth transfer from taxpayers to universities. Masters degrees are almost always a negative ROI endeavor, once opportunity cost is factored in. We shouldn't be subsidizing them even further, which will lead people to get even more of them, given how little they add to future earnings.
IIRC PSLF originally required not ten years of elapsed time but rather 120 sequential on-time payments in full under a qualifying repayment plan, where "on-time" was determined by the loan servicer. And you had to keep working beyond that time until the application was approved (most were rejected) and processed (probably as quickly as government departments usually operate.)
Loan servicers had every incentive to thwart this by declaring payments late or incomplete, steering borrowers into forbearance or non-qualifying repayment plans, etc.
As you can imagine, fewer than 1% of applicants successfully had their loans discharged.
They've been trying to fix things since the pandemic for people who consolidate to a federal direct loan.
So you got a good paying job and had supportive parents. I don’t get why you’re complaining, at least you had parents. What is this program costing you?
I agree it should cost less, but I don't understand why everyone seems to think the government (taxpayers) should be paying these tuitions. The problem is that tuition is ridiculous.
No, that's not clear. I'm sure the state (and other) universities would say that tuition already funds "actual operations". What guidelines do bureaucrats inflict on universities to ensure there are no fake operations sucking up funds? Can you point me to the specific state funding proposals you're talking about?
State bureaucrats will rush and charter gazillion piss poor grade universities to “meet increased demand” - what difference that would make?
Problem is with American University itself, its overbloated mandate, abysmal efficiency, and dysfunctional bureacracy that has very little to do with actual education and its outcomes
> Problem is with American University itself, its overbloated mandate, abysmal efficiency, and dysfunctional bureacracy that has very little to do with actual education and its outcomes
was it always like this though?
from what i've heard it didn't always used to be like that....
Nor compare the quality of average public school with average private school?
The difference is day and night, especially in academics.
Public schools became sort of free daycare. I fear public universities will become something like that plus job program for bureacrats unemployable anywhere else (just like with any state government)
It’s always depressing when we talk about the latest developments in minimum wage and how a day one burger flipper at an In and Out in California is making just as much as someone with 6 years of schooling and responsibility for teaching the next generation.
Oh and that’s not even considering how much of her own $$$ is needed to successfully supply a classroom and how barely any is tax deductible.
Her experiences almost single handedly altered my political viewpoints and who I vote for.
I honestly don't know. I'm in California and "let's not make our teachers minimum wage slaves" wasnt on any candidate's platform from what I researched. Let alone on any of the viable candidates. If no one represents my ideals, what can I do?
California is the state most likely to be able to fix it, simply get a proposition passed that says:
> No administrator of any education system may be paid more than twice the lowest-paid teacher, no matter how many hours that teacher worked during the school year. A teacher is anyone who is responsible or in charge of children or students. Political salaries are deemed administrative of the educational system that is under the purview of that elected body.
Why is California uniquely... nice and compassionate to it's people? It's not liberalism because new england is probably even more liberal? Is it the economy? The weather?
Not really, those people won't be allowed to have tents like that in most states' major cities, california tolerates the fact that they simply exist there
In order for market economies to work (to say nothing of democracies), an educated populace is non-negotiable. The irony is that if you want free markets to work efficiently, you can't leave education to the free market.
Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity.
The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. There's no clearer illustration of our values than the fact that children who, through no fault of their own, have become the responsibility of the state are treated like unwanted trash. The idea that a society like that could figure out how to ethically treat prisoners or immigrants is laughable.
I agree completely. Something so striking about the situation as well is that on balance, we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate.
Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need every ounce of reassurance that we care and that they can integrate and function in society. That they deserve opportunity as anyone else does.
If we had to be self serving we could look at it like “each one of these people is statistically far more likely to be a burden on my own children in the future, so a small investment now could save a lot later”, but we seem to fail even in being selfish about it. I find this topic heart breaking.
For me, state wards are one of the four metrics for judging the quality of a country.
Wards of the state: our responsibility, through no fault of their own.
Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault.
Immigrants: not our responsibility, but an indication of how well we can manage our economy. We should be able to put anybody who comes here to work.
Emigrants: we should let people leave who don't want to be here.
The first three are connected because there's no way to sustain providing anything for prisoners and immigrants that you don't provide for regular citizens. Wards of the state are the nation's children; there's nothing that normal citizens get that they shouldn't get. If they don't get anything, normal citizens are getting less than nothing.
What percentage (approximately) of prisoners in the United States would you categorize as "their fault" and not some product of their upbringing/situation?
At the end of the day, and this will be controversial it does not matter.
Prisons should be a place to house people that have been deemed unable to function in society until such time they can (sometimes that is never). This is not necessarily only violence but violent offenders should be the majority, but people that simply refuse to follow the rules of a society also degrade and are a danger to the society over all. We see this today in the way of rampant shoplifting, and car thefts/breakins taking place in some communities.
These are deemed "non-violent" so the offenders are just let go, however once these "non-violent" crimes reach an extreme level businesses close, people stop shopping in the area, insurance companies stop offering insurance, etc etc etc. That is all with out getting into the real psychological effects of having your property stolen and violated in that way.
At the end of the day I am not concerned about their upbringing/situation, I am concerned about their criminality
We've tried it your way for decades - where prisons are permanent storage for badly made humans - and it doesn't work. They fill up, cost the taxpayer and become yet another thing to exploit. Society looks the other way whilst they get mistreated. Obscenities like rape are constant grim realities of such facilities, and organizations like gangs thrive in them too. Recidivism rates are alarming to boot.
The point of prisons, which Americans consistently fail to grasp, given their penchant for cruelty and selfishness, is reform.
That's what "our responsibility" means. We need to take these broken people and try to rebuild them, because they, their parents and society failed them the first time. Not all of them can be helped, but not to try produces what we have now, which is an abomination.
In reality no one has "tried it my way", you have made the assumption I agree with the current prison system, I dont.
I also do not agree that the "reform" we need is simply letting criminals go who commit property crime, or because of the socio/econimic circumstance, or any of the other "liberal" or "left" visions of reform
Today's system is centered around punishment, not protection of society, or reforming people, etc. It is just punishment. The criminal owes a "debt to society". I disagree with this model.
There is a whole host of reforms I would support both to prisons, and to criminal justice over all. However simply refusing to prosecute shoplifting, or other "minor" property crimes is not one I can support.
You're making non-points. California has not effectively deployed various progressive policies. There exists certain people who are intractably violent or cruel and who cannot be healed or changed with the cutting edge of therapy or medicine.
So what?
This knowledge is not a sufficient excuse to give up on the problem. The status quo is unacceptable. That's the key fact.
These are acts that are not aligned with the topic of reformation of prisoners. Critique of claimed progressive acts (acts done by self proclaimed progressives vs those acts aligned with formalized progressive ideology) is irrelevant. If you just want to dump rhetoric, you can make a new submission for that.
Okay, but this logic is explicitly filtered through class in the US context. Some of the most antisocial members of our society are CEOs, politicians, and similar leaders. The damage they inflict on society often far exceeds that by individual acts of violence, fraud, thievery etc. Think about what has been wrought by Sacklers, the people running 3M, or those who led the country into war premised on lies.
Indeed, your example of how urban cores have been affected by wealth inequality and real estate speculation is a great example of this. San Francisco was a lovely city until landlords and real estate speculators turned it into a casino for gambling on housing and office space.
> San Francisco was a lovely city until landlords and real estate speculators turned it into a casino for gambling on housing and office space.
People were complaining about land speculators in SF in Mark Twain’s time. That was literally when the city started growing. So I’m trying to figure out when you thought SF was a lovely city? Maybe during the property bust of the 1990s?
>>>San Francisco was a lovely city until landlords and real estate speculators turned it into a casino for gambling on housing and office space.
before I even begin to address your others points, many I probably agree with we need to stop with this gas lighting narrative.
landlords and real estate speculators are not the villains of the San Francisco of the story. The city government (and the larger state government) is.
From the endless zoning regulations, environmental regulations, and building regulations that make it impossible to build affordable housing, and a decades long process to build any housing at all to the activist prosecutors refusing to prosecute crime in the city, to the "de-fund the police" movement that has put the local police dept at a huge understaffed situation.... Those are the root causes of the problems. not landlords and real estate speculators
You want to have an honest conversation about corporatism I am game, but you are starting out with disinformation and lies so....
> From the endless zoning regulations, environmental regulations, and building regulations that make it impossible to build affordable housing, and a decades long process to build any housing at all
Who do you think it is exactly that demands that politicians enact these laws? The homeless? Renters? No, it’s the landlords and the real estate speculators who are trying to pump up the value of their investments. This is a very simple case of cui bono.
I’m not in anyway spreading “disinformation and lies,” you just seem to have a very distorted understanding of cause and effect. Here’s the order of operations:
Landlords and real estate speculators buy properties -> Landlords and real estate speculators pressure politicians to protect their investments -> New housing doesn’t get built as a result of this pressure -> Cities become unaffordable because of lack of supply -> Crime and homelessness spikes.
I try to avoid propaganda. The fact your authoritative source is the LA Times provides important context as to why you think the things you do
That said your link does not prove your claim, the fact that Newsom is supported by liberal elite is not news, and only 1 of the families in the story seemingly have connection to being landloards
The other were a oil company, a retailer, and 2 owners of hotels, of which all of them seem to be old money with seemingly no direct connection to current San Fran real estate market.
Well let me also tell you that proactively playing the victim and daring people to challenge you is cringey and gross.
I don’t really like our democratic republic setup personally. I would prefer a popular vote based democracy for presidential elections with federal holiday voting and no ID requirements. Same for city elections although the problems on that scale are different.
Well good news, The local elections in San Fran I believe are already your dream.. How is that working out?
I really like our electoral college system, believe we need stronger ID requirements to vote, and believe we need to repeal the 17th amendment returning more power to the states, removing it from the federal government.
I will agree with one of your reforms, that of a voting holiday, though i would prefer instead to just have Voting week, starting on Sunday, ending on Sat, with no state allowed to release results until the next Monday eliminating the 24 hour news cycle on "election day" and eliminating problems like "voting day bugs" or "rain outs" etc. and the constant battle for "news" organizations to "call" an election 2 seconds into the voting
My support for the Electoral College is not due to outcome.
My Support for it is because we are a Union of States, i.e the United States. Our founders rightly believed government is most responsive at the local level, as such they only engineer one 1/2 of 1 branch of the federal government to be popularly elected. I believe this is the correct measure.
Direct Democracy tends to devolve into dictatorship, and we have seen this in American History as we become more and more "democratic" in our processes, more and power power has shifted to the federal government, and as more and more power has shifted to the federal government that power is further concentrated not in congress but in the Executive Branch, and the Administrative State.
So much so today that agencies of the federal government on a whim or executive order can simply establish new regulations that make millions of people criminals, or completely change entire economic markets with no input from Congress or the people, and in fact it takes an act of congress (or worse the Supreme Court) to stop them.
This is a complete and utter bastardization of a republican form of governance.
Eliminating the electoral college further drives us towards a more direct democracy, something I oppose
We've had tons of voter initiatives totally steamrolled by lobbyists in Sactown and SF. We passed a law to restrict rent increases, a couple years later the corporatists got it shut down before it could become a law. doesn't matter if the citizens elect the city government when rich people and rich corporations can come in and literally bribe their way out of anything.
People that really feel this responsibility become foster parents. But saying the state should deal with them isn't taking on that responsibility - at the end of the day actual people need to be their parents. I'm happy to support those people by having taxes directed their way, but the state doesn't get credit for their good deeds.
It’s unreasonable to expect individuals acting on their own to solve social issues. I am perfectly willing to support 1% of the financial needs of a severely disabled child, but in no way willing to step up and provide 100% of the support they need. There are people willing do do so but it’s not 1:1 with the existing need and so it’s simply not an option.
The common US system where foster families receive funds to provide temporary care for kids in the system isn’t parenting it’s a disaster that’s a massive disservice to kids in the system. In many individual cases it works, but overall it also results in unacceptable amounts of mental, physical, and sometimes even sexual abuse.
This is uselessly dismissive and reductionist. I have a special needs child who just hit remission from Leukemia. To feel that the state has a responsibility for those kids I'm now supposed to also take in a foster child?
Your statement reeks of someone who lives in an ivory tower somewhere.
IMO, the state bears the responsibility to structure the laws and regulations to make it easier for regular people to be heroes. Servant leadership is generally not a characteristic of democracies, as politicians need to take credit in order to win votes.
Is it because of a heavy reliance on government, or a general issue that we face when dealing with hard problems?
Put another way, when we don't rely on governments to help with things like this - does that incentivize people to take on responsibility? I suspect not...
> we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate
Many Americans will stop you at that first word. Who is this we you speak of?
If the pandemic taught me anything, it's that to all too many Americans the most important freedom is freedom from strangers' problems. They don't want to see them, they don't want to hear them, and they sure as hell don't want to pay for them.
Now, if THEY happen to have that problem, that's a different story...after all THEY are real people, unlike...checks notes..."foster kids".
America is the most charitable country in the world[1]. But, as evidenced by the parent's comment, there is no shortage of people willing to spend other people's money, and Americans are justifiably cautious of that.
> America is the most charitable country in the world
Maybe double check your link next time?
> The most noticeable change was arguably the United States, which ranked first in the world in giving for the years 2009-2018 but fell to 19th in the world in 2020.
(I also seriously doubt the methodology of this confident ranking of the world's charity based on self reported charitable behavior in surveys, but this was more humorous)
> However, the U.S. was not the only high-level giver to drop. In fact, many countries that landed in the top 10 most charitable countries in previous years slid completely out of the top 20. According to Charities Aid Foundation Chief Executive Neil Heslop, these changes are not a sign that people's willingness to donate decreased, but that their opportunity to donate diminished, largely as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns. Charity-based retail stores were forced to close, fundraising events were canceled, and many elderly charity volunteers had to shelter themselves instead of volunteering.
I think what you will find is that a stunning amount of that "charity" falls within the giver's social circle. My understanding is it includes donations to the giver's own religious organization. Or even donating to a cause once it's touched you personally -- your mother dies of cancer so you donate to a cancer charity. Giving within your own monkeysphere, and being willfully ignorant of everything outside it, is what I am talking about.
As a spot check I googled "turkey earthquate donations by country". The result is a table with US on top donating $185M, followed by UAE donating $100M, Kuwait $68M, and finally the UN $50M.
I’m convinced this is a structural characteristic of America, resulting from the immigration patterns that built the population.
If you look at polls worldwide, most people wouldn’t leave their home country even if they had the choice to emigrate somewhere else: https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world.... In South Asia, where I’m from, it’s just 11%. Even in sub-Saharan Africa it’s under 40%. Immigrants are the outliers who are willing to leave everything they know behind.
Of course over time there’s regression to the mean, and new communities form here in the US. But most of the US population traces their ancestry only back to the late 19th century or early 20th century. This constant population turnover means there’s a very limited ability to develop the kind of solidarity required to make sacrifices on behalf of strangers in your community.
You're correct, and I don't think this has to be true indefinitely but it's certainly in the DNA of most of North America.
I could go on at length about this. I'm deeply convinced this component of North American culture has contributed significantly to many aspects of decline and general loss of well-being. I won't go on at length of course, I just wanted to say I think you're on point and this feature of a lot of our cultures here is quite harmful.
I think you deserve help as well. This is why I suppose universal basic income, because for someone like you, an extra $1000/month would help tremendously.
Who pays for this magical UBI? Pretty sure you'd have to at some point increase taxes for the very people you're trying to "help" in order to give them back that $1000
Taxing mega corporations more aggressively is one often cited approach, but I agree this doesn’t really provide enough for UBI. 1000 a month to each household would be about 1/20th of our GDP.
Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Please cut me some slack here, by the nature of the world we live in, I have not uttered these thoughts to another human being, and they might have obvious flaws. It's tough when you can't talk about ideas out of fear of the consequences.
I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead.
The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors.
I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?
It's true that enslaved people and their enslavers are no longer alive, but the legacy of slavery has left significant and enduring socio-economic disparities between descendants of enslaved people and those who are not. Inequalities in wealth, education, health, and opportunities persist, often along racial lines. These disparities aren't merely coincidental, but have been reinforced by racially discriminatory policies and practices like segregation, redlining, and racial violence, all of which have historical roots in the institution of slavery.
Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development. Furthermore, it risks minimizing the experience of ongoing racial discrimination faced by Black Americans.
The idea of reparations isn't necessarily about compensating individuals for specific harm done to them, but about a society taking responsibility for historic wrongs and making a concerted effort to rectify those systemic inequalities. Reparations could take many forms, including investment in education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunities for communities disproportionately affected by racial discrimination.
> the legacy of slavery has left significant and enduring socio-economic disparities between descendants of enslaved people and those who are not. Inequalities in wealth, education, health, and opportunities persist, often along racial lines. These disparities aren't merely coincidental, but have been reinforced by racially discriminatory policies and practices like segregation, redlining, and racial violence, all of which have historical roots in the institution of slavery.
This is a fact.
> Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development.
Maybe, don't forget the slave trade enriched tribes inhabiting those regions. It was Africans enslaving other Africans and selling them (at least to my limited understanding on the subject, which may be wrong.)
> Reparations could take many forms, including investment in education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunities for communities disproportionately affected by racial discrimination.
Why make it about race? Just make those things available to all disadvantaged individuals, period.
> Why make it about race? Just make those things available to all disadvantaged individuals, period.
Because…
> the legacy of slavery has left significant and enduring socio-economic disparities between descendants of enslaved people and those who are not. Inequalities in wealth, education, health, and opportunities persist, often along racial lines. These disparities aren't merely coincidental, but have been reinforced by racially discriminatory policies and practices like segregation, redlining, and racial violence, all of which have historical roots in the institution of slavery.
Parent made the case very plain.
Try a thought experiment: your ancestors were enslaved in America. After emancipation, every generation of your ancestors was subject to both systemic and individual discrimination and violence.
The question is, what would you want done? Do the answers “well that’s all in the past” or “how about these other people though” satisfy? It’s worth thinking about. Personally I do not know what my own answer would be, other than that I would almost certainly be angry and distrustful.
I do know what my answer would be. I don't make excuses or play the victim card or blame my current condition on external circumstances. I accept what has passed, what my current situation is, and try to play the hand I was dealt the best way I can. That's my personality, I don't think that'd change.
I can certainly understand why one would be bitter about "every generation of your ancestors was subject to both systemic and individual discrimination and violence". They have a right to be upset. A lot of people have a right to be upset about a lot of things. I don't think you can jump from that to reparations though.
> Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development.
Slavery in Africa was widespread before the Atlantic slave as well as after the Atlantic slave trade. There's some apologism (interestingly enough, quite similar to Southern U.S. slavery apologism) claiming that it wasn't that bad, but if you look at the actual accounts it could be extremely brutal. Like with the U.S. there was certainly a degree of different experiences, but like in the U.S., that doesn't justify the practice.
In the end it was actually European powers that ended most slavery in Africa, often with a great deal of local opposition ("The End of Slavery in Africa" is a decent starting place if you want to see how it happened in each individual area).
Ethiopia is an interesting example - it wasn't colonized[1], and so slavery there persisted long after it ended in most of the continent. The League of Nations kept pressuring the country to end the practice, but it kept dragging it's feet. It only ended when Italy invaded in the run-up to WWII (it's also interesting as a non-colonized control country when it comes to colonization).
[1] It was conquered by fascist powers for some years, the same as most of Europe.
> Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development
That’s the hight of results-oriented reasoning. The historical norm is that different societies did not progress at the same rate. Europeans got ahead of Africa and Asia in the 1500s-1900s. That’s why they were positioned to engage in things like colonialism to begin with.
But go back a bit further—Britons were about a thousand years late to the Bronze Age. Nobody held them back. It’s just that key milestones of civilizational development aren’t distributed evenly. Because of course they aren’t.
> the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development
It was my understanding that most of the slaves traded were already slaves, so it wasn’t just plundering the continent to kidnap people.
I’m not particularly well studied about this. Am I wrong? What were the effects that hindered the continent’s development? Was it the incentive to capture slaves to trade led to more wars of capture/conquest?
So there's actually a lot of academic debate on the merits of reparations, and exactly what and how much reparations should be.
A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
The oversimplified con argument: Okay, but if you come from a wealthy African American family, why should you have a leg up over a poor (or otherwise more disadvantaged) white student? What about an immigrant, who didn't benefit from slavery at all?
Fundamentally there's a huge swath of different injustices across society, and we obviously can't fix all of them at once, so a big challenge in this sort of debate is how you slice the injustices and how you prioritize fixing them.
I don't think it's possible to do that, in general. Anyone can find an injustice if they look hard enough.
I have some ancestors that fled religious persecution in France. Many died. The ones that fled gave up everything. Should I play the victim card and petition France to restore the land my ancestors were chased off of?
History is pretty ugly, I'm sure everyone could find a justified grievance if they tried hard enough.
I think the logical thing is to focus on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. What things can we do to distribute opportunity more equally in society? Things like free post-secondary education, free health care would seem to be a better use of resources.
you know the reason that we don't have those things is precisely because politicians campaigned on the narrative that black people (welfare queens, etc) would unfairly take advantage of a system like that and they won.
So it seems like you understand what needs to be done but what not what the blocking issues are.
To reinforce your point, those same politicians are fighting against student loan forgiveness. This is telling; to them, only suffering under the burden of non-dischargeable debt entitles you to the same opportunities as a wealthy family.
> A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
I'm confused by the pro argument. My known lineage was not enslaved, but my grandparents immigrated with 0$, and my family has no generational wealth and we don't receive reparations.
Isn't being freed from slavery the same as being freshly immigrated with 0$?
Furthermore, there are tons of Asian immigrants that come from a third world country with virtually nothing, but become top earners because of their cultural values of education and filial piety
One could argue that despite being free, African Americans still had to work against racism, unfair laws, and a system rigged against them in many ways. Those are things a white immigrant wouldn't have had to deal with, but black immigrants would have. Is the black immigrant excluded or included in any potential reparations?
The overall precedence is that reparations are paid to the people who experienced the harm, and the reparations are paid by those culpable of the harm. The Japanese who experienced internment were paid reparations by the United States government that took their property. Holocaust victims that had their property stolen were paid reparations by the former Nazis.
By contrast Irish Americans could very justifiably claim that were it not for Anglo oppression, they would be far wealthier. But we wouldn't fine Anglos today to pay Irish Americans. Slavery hits a similar issue, limiting the reparations to the party that did harm is very vague when you're approaching two centuries later. Most proposals for "reparations" aren't anything remotely close to actual reparations. A recent immigrant is assigned as much liability as a descendant of plantation owners. This isn't a reparation, this is a tax assigned without regard to culpability.
The harms from slavery didn't end after the civil war. We had to pass laws a century later in the 1960s to outlaw the racist policies implemented by federal and state govts after reconstruction. The social (and legal) structure of american society has always had black people at the bottom, and until that is fixed then black people as a group are still being actively damaged by the legacy of chattel slavery.
And now you have to start picking which racist policies are worthy of compensation and which aren't. Asians faced the Chinese exclusion act, as well as redlining for example. Will the aforementioned anti-irish and anti-catholic discrimination also receive reparations? And again, how wilp you identify the liable party, or will we just tax everybody?
What injustice? Each of these people have the same rights: those enumerated in the bill of rights. That is justice. If there were economic rights in our system there would be case for calling the status quo injustice but there aren't.
(this isn't to say that things can't be changed, but it would require the adoption of new amendments).
Yes, that is true (I don't know about the exact numbers, but there's no question there's a difference.)
Asian Americans are even better off, but why should they have to pay for reparations? Their ancestors weren't involved in slavery in the US.
Hispanic Americans are also pretty poor (more so than African-Americas if memory serves), but they weren't disadvantaged by slavery, should they have to chip in for reparations?
Southerners were clearly disadvantaged by fighting and losing the civil war, does the North owe them anything?
What about the survivors and next of kin of the soldiers that put it all on the line for their country in Iraq and Afghanistan only to find out the government lied to them and everyone else about why they were there?
Everybody could find a grievance if they look hard enough. Which ones do we try to address?
Honestly, who gives a shit? We are a society, not a bunch of White people and Asian people and Black people and Hispanic people. A functioning society would work to fix those numbers, because it's absolutely a problem that needs to be fixed, not a punishment for being a member of a "successful" ethnicity.
I agree, work on creating a more equal society, with better opportunities for all, instead of playing the game of who's the bigger victim. Because we can all play the victim card, including me and you, and it's just not productive or beneficial to anyone.
I agree exactly. And what about people who’s families moved here in the last 140 years. They surely didn’t own slaves.
And who even gets reparations? If someone’s great great great grandmother was a black slave but every other relative was white, does this person get reparations?
I think the key question is: do reparations actually change anything? You give one generation a 'payout' so the politicians can wipe their hands of the issue, then what, are we back to the same point with the next generation? What about those old enough where the handout won't do anything for them?
How do reparations actually move the relationship forwards? Handing out money does not solve anything fundamentally. They need to focus on understanding and building a positive future for all, which means working towards ensuring legally and policy-wise there is no remaining racial bias or discrimination (equal opportunity for all - not outcome) and working away from holding the grudges of previous generations.
The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved
Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?
There were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.
That's my justification for affirmative action (not reparations). Should it last forever? No but it hasn't been that many generations since the civil rights act
> Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?
No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from. Were it not for slavery, again as abhorrent as it was, they'd be a lot worse off today.
> here were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.
It is also easy to forget that the suppliers of slaves were African nations that practiced slavery themselves. They found the Europeans to be great customers for their slaves. So descendants of the Ashanti and others benefited from the selling of slaves. If we really want to look at reparations, we probably need some way to determine what percentage each person benefited from slavery and what percentage they suffered from it. Also there were slaves from Asia and other places that are probably just as deserving of payments if that happens. But all of this flies in face of the narrative that slavery was something whites did to blacks.
A better approach would be to try to provide opportunities that people can take advantage of. The US actually does a great job of this which is why we don't see mass exodus of people trying to go back to the African nations.
Easily forgotten? It's brought up in just about every discussion on the subject, including this one, already, by the person you were replying to agree with.
Well if you want to take money from the general population and give to people whose ancestors were harmed by slavery, you need some way to differentiate between ancestors who were harmed by and ancestors who benefited from slavery.
If that isn't part of the discussion, then people are just proposing a welfare system to give money to people based on the color of their skin.
No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from.
Because those countries were devastated by Europeans
Those countries were created by Europeans, they didn’t exist before that. The tribes that were there before were not much of a civilization. They weren’t behind the rest of the world because of colonialism, they were colonized because they were behind the rest of the world.
you keep saying that but your set of facts is clearly missing many pieces (you admit as much) so to keep repeating it doesn't make it any more true and is really revealing a lot.
It’s not really a personal attack to point out that your “just asking questions” routine happens to dovetail nicely with certain political talking points. Why so defensive?
Why don't you name the pieces of facts that are missing then so the parent can respond to it?
You keep making personal attacks and asking if the parent is employed by the state of Florida. What does their employment situation have to do with anything?
Ahh, I honestly don't pay attention to usernames. I replied to someone who is defending your attacker and making the same low effort quips so I assume they have no problem with the bizarre employment question or they would have flagged the comment or called it out for what it is.
To point you in the right direction: "to keep repeating it doesn't make it any more true and is really revealing a lot" of undesirable things about you as a person. The latter words added by me and implied. That's a personal attack.
nobody gives a shit about the logical arguments. it's social maneuvering for power and money. in other words, it's politics. the sooner you understand that people are looking out for their own monetary interests the less confused you will be about the whole thing.
> Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense?
Yes. The slaves did labor. That labor demands wages. The fact that the formerly enslaved also benefited from public goods to which all citizens had access does not pay down the debt owned to them for their labor.
I guess a better question is whether reparation paid out to 5th+ generation descendants of slaves make sense. How do you even implement that practically?
Figure out how much the labor was worth. Throw on punitive damages for having enslaved them against their will their entire lives. Now calculate for having invested that money at the time that slavery ended.
That's a good STARTING point.
Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person.
Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery.
Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.
Or themselves since plenty of the victims were alive. This was a single event that lasted ~4 years with comparatively very good records.
Slavery lasted for several hundreds years, there are not records for most slaves and even cases where they can identified good luck tracking down all of their descendants. That's several magnitudes more complex, to an incomparable extent.
> Figure out how much the labor was worth
So do you need to find specific ancestors who were slaves and the payout would be based on how long did they work for? So... somebody who's great-great-great-great-grandfather died when he was 72 years old would receive twice as much than someone who's ancestor only lived to 36?
Of course you'll be especially lucky if you can find any ancestors who were shipped to the America in the 1600s. I bet slaveholders kept perfect record, especially back in those days.
Then you have to figure out how to split the payout between 50 to 1000 (un)verifiably descendants of the same individual or will be on first come first serve basis?
All this just seems so bizarrely impractical that I can't believe anyone would seriously suggest it after spending more than 2-5 minutes thinking about how would it work.
Your argument is that we should never do anything because attempting to do the right thing to people who have had their pasts and futures stolen is hard.
Meanwhile we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math. It's not that difficult to come up with a minimum standard unless you're in the "do nothing" category.
I also have some more "ideological" objections. .e.g why don't we just focus on creating opportunities for all presently disadvantaged people regardless of who their ancestors 150-300 years ago were?
> is hard
Not hard, objectively infeasible to accomplish in a sufficiently equitable way.
> we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math
What math? And what would you do with those censuses? There are no individual records... Could you at the very try least try clearly define who would receive these "reparations"? Would any descendants of black slaves or enslaved Native Americans (or are we not thinking about the natives at all?) get the same share? Would it depend on the proportion of your ancestors who were enslaved? Would your current financial circumstances affect this? Would you have to do a DNA test measuring the proportion of your genome coming from Africa, Europe etc. and use that to calculate the payout?
One of the basic principles in Western law, stretching back 700 years or so, is that prosecuting people not involved in a crime is unacceptable. The slaves and the enslaved are long dead. No one has legally owned slaves for 150+ years.
How do you apportion the taxes? Do new immigrants owe the same as people here generations? Do the descendants of Irish immigrants owe the same as descendants of slave owners? What about the black descendants of black slave owners, of whom there were over a thousand?
And how far does this go back? The Comanches were extremely brutal. They killed and enslaved many people from many tribes, especially the Apache. Should they be responsible for reparations to the Apache and other tribes they crushed?
You're missing the point. No one is being "punished" for their ancestors having owned slaves. The idea is to assist people whose ancestors were exploited, legally and systemically.
It may help to think of it as assistance for victims of a natural disaster, which seems pretty universally acceptable. The disaster being a very messed up society. Or as something like the Marshall Plan that helped restore Europe after, again, society’s global screwup.
If foster children were raised so well that people were jealous, maybe that would create an adverse incentive for people to create more children than they can handle and desert children that they’ve already had?
You live in a democracy. If ward's of the state were well taken care of, it would imply a voting majority who recognize this as valuable. Maybe they would also do other things with that power, like vote for increased assistance and benefits for parents in general, or expand the program to be a blanket "everyone can have free state college".
Social constructs don’t determine what is real or not. Instead they function as processes within a wider ecosystem. Every political decision that’s made has adverse consequences since they require force, no matter the political structure. If something is valuable to people they will do it freely without requiring force; but if something is valuable to a select group at the expense of others, the result is always some degree of negative side effects. It may be possible to argue some social good outweighs those effects, but dismissing them because “we live in a democracy” reveals a totalitarian view of the state.
So tell me, how are state congressman chosen? Senators? Federal congressmen? Local school boards, state judges, county sherriffs. What happens before a new president takes power? What procedure is implemented to facilitate that?
The word “democracy” is never mentioned in the declaration if independence or the constitution. Very specifically because the founders recognized how dangerous democracies are. To prevent the runaway issues you’ve pointed out.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.
So lower class kids (through no fault of their own as well..) should not have access to higher education? That's was very weird of phrasing. What about making education accessible to all people regardless of their who their parents were instead of trying to make people jealous?
>The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were.
Absolutely. As my mother used to say, parents should (at a minimum) pay for education and therapy (not to mention housing with electricity and indoor plumbing, food, clothes, etc.). Since the government of California is the legal guardian of these children, it's really the least they can do.
Disagree. It is not the states job to raise foster kids. It’s the states job to match them with families that want to take them in and care for them like their own. There’s a line a mine long of people that are desperate to adopt but have to job through endless hoops.
Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.
It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of institutionalized bigotry. Unfortunately certain minorities get turned away from AA benefits because the narrative is focused on only one group despite historical slights affecting many more. As implemented, it wasn't even fair to the people it was claiming to assist.
> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived
Given that the money to do that would have been taken from those parents, you can see why in a democracy parents would object to having their resources stolen for government kids to have better lives over their own.
This makes me think that your original comment was some form of sarcasm. So your plan is to incentivize lower class parents to abandon their children because the state would be able to take better care of them?
Affirmative action came in response to Jim Crow. When slavery ended during the civil war, people had the idea that it wasn’t needed. It wasn’t until reconstruction ended and southern states leaned heavily into racist policy making that it became popular.
> In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were.
Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.
It's probably the most dystopian and I'm very glad I didn't have to scroll to the bottom before someone said otherwise.
The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids.
Foster children are not a protected class under the law.
Perhaps foster kids could or even should be a protected class, however unlike most protected classes that have faced historical systematic discrimination codified in law, the general hardships of foster children are not based in unjust laws.
I have worked in Dependency law (ie with children that have been abused, abandoned and neglected) which deals a lot with foster kids.
I favor programs that provide funding for foster kids like this and provide assistance when they “age out” of care, but it is a broad brushstroke and doesn’t take into consideration individual situations as you suggest. In other words foster children are not all alike nor are their situations. Some live in group homes and they are just a number or a check for foster parents, some live in loving and supportive homes, even sometimes in the homes of relatives when parental rights were lost but they are still considered foster children. Some become foster kids at 17 and others are born into it. There is everything in between.
It is about the equivalent in terms of diversity of situations as being a minority/protected class that has historically been discriminated against.
There's another unique aspect to this particular case--if the children "aged out" without being adopted, then they don't have functioning parents to pay for the massive costs of college, which is what the current financial aid and pricing model relies on. Even if the kids had a good childhood, they aren't going to have the financial resources to pay for college themselves.
And even if they have an almost adopted type of situation with their final foster parents, those parents still shouldn't have to pay all the college costs. They may not have even had the children placed with them long enough to save for that.
That’s just it, some foster parents might actually be very wealthy, some might have had the children all their lives, some nearly destitute and use foster care as a paycheck, and some kids might have gone into foster care a few months before graduating high school and aging out. This was my entire point in response to the parent comment, I like the program, just want to highlight that foster care isn’t as much of a individualize circumstance as they may believe, it’s just as diverse a experience as growing up a minority.
I mentioned in another reply, in Florida we have programs that offer financial assistance to kids that age out and continue their education. I support the programs, but there are things that should be acknowledged like it resulting in foster kids not getting adopted that otherwise would as financial strategy, or kids going into foster care right before aging out to qualify for the program.
You missed the part where I say I support the program and programs like this for foster kids that age out, I just don’t agree that the program is narrowly tailored to individual situations.
Trust me here in Florida there are many parents who put their kids in foster care at 17 so they qualify for governmental housing allowances.
I’m all for free college tuition, for all. I want an educated society, I want better paying jobs resulting in higher taxes, and I don’t want government guaranteed loans resulting in unaffordable tuition and life long debt.
Yeah, the one where freshman physics in college blew threw 2 years of daily honors public school physics in 2 weeks. The one where the high school diploma is nigh worthless in the marketplace. The one where the students have no skin in the game and disrupt the classes and assault the teachers.
It all does not have to be free, just a government funded option to provide a floor. Public school was my only saving grace, being from an immigrant family that did not know English or how to navigate America.
Although, I also do not think government needs to pay for free schooling for 17 years. Can easily cut some fluff and drop that to 15 years, and still give people a solid foundation equivalent to a Bachelors.
The issue is the pareto principle. As it is the CSU/UC systems cannot support every applicant that wants to come in. But making it completely free they'd be flooded with most of the country's prospective students.
Also, schools are state funded as well as federally funded. So there's a bunch of issues when it comes to out of state students and who should cover. That exists even with today's crazily high priced tuition.
In most cases higher education is to some extent "rationed" and generally less accessible than in the US. Only a few countries in Europe have more University graduates. Which is of course perfectly rational if you have no ideological objects to some degree of centralized planning.
Oxford (like Harvard) is often less about what you'll know and more about WHO you'll know.
At the undergrad level, the subject matter is generally very well-established. But when you want a job after graduation, being close friends with the CEO's child helps far more than a few tenths of a point on your GPA.
Legacy admissions and nepotism are still very much a thing.
> what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation
Also, just helping them out. Nobody gets hurt. This isn't creating an allotment of seats for foster kids. The selection process, and thus odds, are the same for them and everyone else.
UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, Virginia Tech, College of William & Mary, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin Madison, Purdue...
America has a solid stable of top-tier public universities.
> Those are universities and not colleges. Cãnada College, Foothills college, De Anza College are examples of “community colleges”.
Community colleges are rarely described as "state colleges." The latter refers to state-backed higher education institutions, from De Anza College to the University of Pennsylvania.
The delineation between colleges and universities varies regionally. Nowhere does it solely signify exclusivity. In America, there is an accreditation difference that largely pertains to graduate school.
Free prenatal and neonatal care seems like an obvious first step. It's literally taking care of the unborn and babies, so they have a healthy start to life. (I similarly believe education, school breakfasts and lunches, and pediatric care should be free.)
We could sidestep all the drama by letting anyone who meets the academic qualifications attend public universities and colleges without tuition (or at least an insubstantial fees). We might actually end up with a system like we had 75 years ago… but with less overt racism and sexism.
I've only seen them used this way in public policy circles, and left-leaning ones at that. It's also totally discontinuous with the treatment of equality in classical literature.
Put another way, isn't equity just a masking term for top-to-bottom wealth transfers?
It depends on with whom I'm speaking. Even the Wikipedia page for the former is a disambiguation [1].
The historical (and international) use of the former is closer to that of egalitarianism [2]. I fail to see what is gained by redefining equality and creating the term equity
when equal opportunity vs. equality of outcome has decades of scholarship behind it, to say nothing of being clearer on first glance.
I don't know enough to render judgement. But it smells like the tail-chasing semantics the social sciences love, randomly re-appropriating jargon instead of debating the underlying problem.
In any conversation, inter-discplinary or not, agreeing on what a word means is important.
For me, there is a difference between equity and equality.
As you mentioned, people will hammer on the lens of the interpretation without being aware of it, or not being able to explain the core of it.
I would start with the idea of access to education and access to opportunity to apply education to uplift current and future generations.
Removing built in barriers that have been in the public education system (based off the industrial education system to keep turning out reliable and obedient factory workers by omitting certain information) is one place to start.
Still, not every baby starts at the same start line, and not everyone has the same headwinds, or tailwinds. Some argue its impossible to make everyone equal or equitable, but there are some parts of that spectrum that will never be able to to even be close to equals in average, and the conversation starts around that, and those who are in a position to more default succeed by failing upwards, and those who are not.
There's a lot of focus on breaking ceilings. I often wonder about how it looks for the average person, however that is defined to access opportunity compared to someone who is not a part of the majority, for example.
The interpretation on whether this should be made equitable for everyone, or only to a certain degree is definitely a topic of discussion.
In 1968, H. George Frederickson articulated "a theory of social equity" and put it forward as the 'third pillar' of public administration.[4] Frederickson was concerned that those in public administration were making the mistake of assuming that citizen A is the same as citizen B; ignoring social and economic conditions.
Using the term launched, similar to how tech companies launch products, implies a conspiracy to bring this word to the public's attention
Affirmative action was to address systemic inequalities, not individual ones. Bringing it up in an article about foster kids and then further including the bit about gender feels like flamebait.
True, but many forms of discrimination are legal and good. Minimum age to drive is ageism, but I think we would all agree that it’s a good form of discrimination. You say “no matter how well intentioned” as if the intention isn’t important. But intention and outcome are both very important and determine whether a given form of discrimination is good or bad.
The parent referred to affirmative action, not a specific case. Affirmative action is practised by many organizations in many different forms. That’s what I was replying to. If you’re genuinely interested, you can find well though out opinions on that specific case with a quick Google search.
Asians are over-represented in Harvard (note: I do no know if this is actually true) and the kinds of students rejected from Harvard but who'd get in anyway aren't exactly the kinds of students who'd fall out of society.
I recognize the racism, but I also see the point of justification there. There is some distinct difference in discrimination at the top and discrmination at the bottom of the societal rungs.
I don't see where it could possibly be justifiable to discriminate against Asians. Where is the systemic racism that somehow gives Asians an advantage?
It's almost as if they are being punished for ruining the narrative through their own hard work, which would force people to admit that other minorities being underrepresented at Ivy League colleges is due to something other than just "systemic racism".
>I don't see where it could possibly be justifiable to discriminate against Asians
I just did. You don't have to accept that justification, but I don't imagine it's an uncommon sentiment. There's a difference between not getting into Harvard but pretty still having a dozen top universities of choice and barely even getting out of high school because your area's education was under-funded due to historical factors.
I don't know the historical factors that lead to Asian-Americans being so successful in comparison to other minorities, but it's clear they need less help as a whole compared to other minorities. There's your justification.
>It's almost as if they are being punished for ruining the narrative through their own hard work
You can interpret it that way. You can also say that the AA is starting to focus more on those who need it, and Asians seem to need it the least as of now.
>force people to admit that other minorities being underrepresented at Ivy League colleges is due to something other than just "systemic racism".
So what are you suggesting? Again, my Asian american history is very superficial, but I think it's hard to deny that it's a shorter history than African or Mexican American history in this context.
I don’t think it’s ironic, it is acknowledged by the Supreme Court that hears and rules on affirmative actions cases with some regularity.
The reason they take these cases so often is because affirmative action must be narrowly tailored and affirmative action programs are often found to be Unconstitutional.
Also, affirmative action as a whole, as acknowledged by the Supreme Court, is a temporary measure to level the playing field of prior systemic racism. So even in the instances a program is currently a constitutional even that is for a temporary period of time.
People often complain about the nature of it, but generally don’t have any solutions to address the realities of historic discrimination codified in law, at best people suggest to ignore it a do nothing be happy those old laws have been over turned and move on, the problem there is typically the people that suggest doing nothing to right the wrongs of the past benefit from damage of historical systematic racism and discrimination.
And the use of a police, courts, juries, and prisons to punish and prevent violence is violence, yet very few people complain about fighting fire with fire in that spectrum (even if they disagree with the implementation).
In the United States, a lot of times the individual situation is correlated to their skin color.
The condition of being descendants of slaves, or people who faced other forms of official discrimination cited in the prevention of intergenerational wealth such as redlining, blockbusting or unfavorable treatment in the GI bill, etc., is ultimately an individual situation for each individual affected.
The idea that you can dismiss that as not an individual hardship -- though it kind of is for those impacted -- strikes me as pretty much a word game, nothing more. Not unlike the word games American laws started to use when they could no longer punish people de jure for their race.
How many slaves in the family tree should someone have to qualify? Do white slaves count? How far back should we go? Would citizens whose families have immigrated to this country after the deed be also on the hook for reparations? Should reparations only be given to struggling people, or should they be given out regardless of the situation of the descendant of a slave?
It's a lot easier to quantify and equalize the situation here and now rather than to try to make up for a future that could have been, and for which no living being is responsible. The past is complex and blurry, and families aren't a straight line. And generally, people aren't bound by their ancestor's misdeeds.
Poor people should get more help from society in the US, that's a fact: race might be a strong predictor for poverty, but the best signal for poverty remains income and wealth, right here and right now.
Why bother looking at anything else? Are poor whites or asians somehow more blameable for their poverty than poor blacks? Should a successful black person get reparations from a white hobo, simply based on their lineage (that none of them have control on)?
I agree, it's hard to codify. But there is undoubtedly a large group of people, often identified by their race, that face disproportionate hardship and continued to be legally discriminated against well after slavery was abolished. And note that I mentioned other, post-slavery problems, and you jump right into "how many slaves??"
It is very possible to have someone with dark skin today who is descended equally parts from former slaves and Africans who were responsible for selling the slaves to the Europeans.
That doesn't address his questions. If you're going to codify these things into law, then you should be able to answer questions like this. My paternal grandfather was discriminated against for being black. In truth he was half black, but that didn't temper the racism he faced from people who considered him to be black. For the purposes of reparations, am I 1/4th black or 1/8th black? Because he was my paternal grandfather and family wealth has traditionally been passed on predominantly through father to son, does my paternal grandfather count more than my maternal grandmother? And if I marry a white woman, will my son be 1/8th black or 1/16th black for the purposes of reparations? Does he get any?
These are sticky questions, but if you're serious about reparations being law then you should be prepared to give some straight-forward answers without deflection.
Because other people seem to be pushing the idea that race is the signal, as they are pushing for a redistribution along racial lines rather than economic lines.
I don't think anyone here is denying that there is a correlation, but there's a very legitimate question over whether policy should target the correlated trait (skin color) or the hardship itself (poverty) when trying to fix the problem.
The issue is, a lot of problems have been nominally "fixed". But the black community on average has not caught up with the gaps created and re-enforced by these earlier systems. eg. They didn't get to participate as much as white peers in housing booms due to redlining, blockbusting, etc. So if you started out European-American in 1930 [random 20th century year], or having the same wages and being black in that same year, odds are pretty good descendants of the latter are doing poorer, due to multiple racist housing policies.
If they haven't caught up, that's presumably true as measured by several concrete metrics, correct? So the question still is: why target skin color (the correlated trait) instead of those metrics?
I'm not staking out a position here, I haven't made up my mind myself. I'm just pointing out that OP raised a valid point which you didn't really address.
It's a hard question to answer because the two are entertwined. Hence the term socio-economics.
Poverty is disproportionately in minorities' court due to historical discrimination based on skin color. That doesn't mean that there aren't poor white people. But it does mean that actions targeting minorities end up overlapping a lot with poverty.
The main reason it's relatively easy to target skin color is, well, visuals. Another can of worms in and of itself, but for the most part it's pretty easy to look at a certain minorities and pin them as such.Meanwhile financials are private and it's not like every millionaire is driving a fancy car with a suit and tie.
> actions targeting minorities end up overlapping a lot with poverty
Yes, but they also have a false positive rate (rich minorities) and a false negative rate (poor white people) that is much higher than a properly administered means test.
Given this, and given how controversial race-based affirmative action is, it's worth questioning whether attempting to sort based on race as a sort of shortcut to sorting based on economics is doing more harm than good. If we could implement a race-blind affirmative action program that got bipartisan support, could we not solve poverty faster than if we continue to alienate one side by insisting on excluding poor white people?
> The main reason it's relatively easy to target skin color is, well, visuals. Another can of worms in and of itself, but for the most part it's pretty easy to look at a certain minorities and pin them as such.Meanwhile financials are private and it's not like every millionaire is driving a fancy car with a suit and tie.
Why should a goal of an affirmative action system be to be able to make the accept/reject call based on a quick glance at the applicant's photo?
We already ask college students to provide an assessment of their means for the FAFSA, and about 3/4 do so. It's not long or complicated, and I see no reason why a similar system couldn't be used for a means-based admissions process.
> If we could implement a race-blind affirmative action program that got bipartisan support, could we not solve poverty faster than if we continue to alienate one side by insisting on excluding poor white people?
The issue is that it's hard to make something "race blind". Not without essentially making a lottery system in the process with how little data you're given. The moment you give high school data, you give approximate data on your area, which means your area's demographic and economonics. If we could have a world where standardize grades and national test scores it may be possible to pull it off (btw: national test scores also correlate with income levels, especially since they cost money/time to take and can be taken multiple times. IQ tests have also shown their bias). But as is it is a utopic dream.
>Why should a goal of an affirmative action system be to be able to make the accept/reject call based on a quick glance at the applicant's photo?
It's not just a photo. your race is considered a public statistic. You can opt to say "prefer not to answer" but I imagine 95%+ of applicants to report it.
It's the exact opposite of finances, and it's not as easy to grab that data even as a public institution. I don't think submissions offices even get that data to consider. Should they get that data? I don't know. I think we can imagine a dozen ways that can help and also be a complete catastrophe. That's a much larger topic of discussion.
Being Black in America is actually a specific situation with structural inequality baked in. It is strictly based on skin color and it is backed up by a significant number of studies, as well as observed by its actual victims [1]
Affirmative action is about reinforcing the bottom so it doesn't fall any further. It isn't about supporting anyone for a particular reason, but anyone in a condition they can not control.
Is everything culture war all the time now on this site? Every post becomes a stupid comment section where we'd be better off getting an LLM to write the comments for us.
Here it's people trying to insert their affirmative action narratives and also rant about California a bit (in a backhanded way).
What are you looking for? Do you think the post shouldn't have been on here at all? Or if it's here do you think discussion should be limited to a certain perspective or a certain axis? Admitting a political story inherently admits political opinions. What would "doing better" look like?
I completely understand that everything has a political dimension. And the broader culture war is leaving nothing untouched. But that means we have less room for a shared community even in small spaces like this.
What I lament is that the community of tech folks, embodied by sites such as HN, have splintered and moved away from their roots. I mean go watch the documentaries about the early days of the 70s and 80s and even the not so early days of the 00s: vision, tinkering, weirdness, geekery, cussedness, anti-authority, pay it forward, etc. That is what defined the scene. That's our roots and I'd like it to come through in comments here. Instead it's just culture war: us vs. them, grievances, IGMFU, and all the rest.
What kind of discussion did you expect on a post like this? Obviously everybody is going to talk about the politics involved, that's the only thing that you can discuss here.
Perhaps we'd be better off not having any country or state or city does X type posts here unless they're about tech. (That won't solve it, though, because any mention of certain cities or states, even in a tech context, brings out the culture warriors.)
This site doesn't limit posts to only tech. The social culture in this site simply makes technical posts more likely to hit the front page.
I'm not surprised techies are inherently interested in some socio-political stuff. Especially a topic like education where they may feel it should be an egalitarian endeavor (the interpretation of "egalitarian" inevitably causes conflicts, of course).
>any mention of certain cities or states, even in a tech context, brings out the culture warriors.
any mention of any high level topic will bring them out. I don't know what to say about that. As long as they are engaging with the topic and arguments and not devolving into attacking users or spreading hate, there's nothing wrong with a strongly opinionated comment.
I think about it information theoretically. Oversimplifying, the information content of something is how unpredictable it is in a given channel. On HN, in 2023, the information content of yet another comment ranting about some given city or state or group of people is basically zero. Everyone has seen those comments a thousand times recently and it adds nothing to the discussion.
I think about it more pragmatically. If we removed a post because we were afraid of an effortless comment, we'd have no posts.
I think the post itself is worth noting and is interesting. It has room for, how you put it, unpredictable responses. I can't control who or what comments on it, only who to engage with or flag. In that regard, it sounds like a moderation problem more than a content problem to me (Maybe a user problem, but I'm assuming that banning 10 specific users doesn't solve the problem). And I feel you're offering a content solution to a moderation problem, which simply doesn't align.
The real question to ask is: is the moderation inadequate? How do we fix it? I feel like asking to ban these posts is giving up to the trolls and provocateurs rather than fixing the underlying problem.
I agree that a ban on the posts isn't the right way. I agree moderation is the right way forward but we need much more active anti flamebait and anti culture war moderation.
Why post like this should be here at all? How it meets the inclusion criteria?
If I remember correctly, not so long ago dang was editing out posts about ongoing armed revolt in Russia - a country that started largest war in Europe in recent history. And yet there is a post about minor policy decision in one of the 50 states.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I think you can argue there's an interesting new phenomenon here. By these rules, I'm guessing the original "Russia attacks Ukraine" post would be allowed, but not the 50th update on the war.
It is an interesting new phenomena. I think it dilutes the original purpose of this forum and as a side topic it would be interesting to figure why it's happening more, but maybe its fair to just let things evolve to what people what them to be, even if people that used to come here for technical things mostly might stop frequenting it as much I guess - it takes time to keep hitting the hide button. It's getting like posting political commentary on a recipe site, and I do get that it's not a perfect analogy but hopefully you see what I mean....
Honestly we'd be better off cutting out everything political and err on the side of being over-inclusive with "political." California deserves to be dunked on for a lot of things but should hacker news be the place for that?
I'm sure someone will glibly informs me that "everything is political". So please tell me how "High-Performance server for NATS.io, the cloud and edge native messaging system"[1] is political like this discussion about controversial public policy. Clearly, and thankfully, there is a spectrum.
I flagged that top level affirmative action comment, and I hope more people do. Contentless flamewars about unrelated culture war policies are boring, and are a negative contribution to the discussion.
I agree with the guidelines, but they aren't working anymore. I can predict the tenor and content of the comments on half of the HN front page these days just from the title and domain, which means flagging isn't cutting it.
There is also a "hide" button. I assure you that right now there are countless internet fora where countless people are having discussions that for some subset any of us would find horrible. Better just to not engage with what you don't like.
It seems pretty relevant to me. The comment was also positive, applauding this policy for actually trying to identify improvishment.
I don't see how you could describe this point as "culture war", "negative", or "flamewar". I suspect you just don't agree.
What's unfortunate about HN is that when enough people disagree, those ideas go away and others aren't aware they are even being expressed. The intent of these moderation features is to remove low quality content, but it's almost always a filter for ideology and sociability.
I can't count the number of times I have been reading an interesting comment or submission, and suddenly its flagged and completely invisible.
This seems to be a part of a guaranteed jobs program. Wish we were moving to a basic income program but I'm convinced that we will need one or the other or some combination of the two. Jobs at a community college would be ideal to replace some of the early jobs that would be eliminated by AI.
I think community colleges have been growing and this could continue the growth. It wouldn't seem like a huge change, but the alternative might be shrinking enrollments. The state government would feel the pressure to provide jobs, and this could help them, while doing some good for young people along the way.
My understanding is that the Fostering Futures program only affects tuition costs, not admission probability. Foster students will still need to work hard to get into the state schools that offer them free tuition.
If anything, this policy may (slightly) increase the average test scores at California state universities. Now that foster students can attend for free, it means there will be more applicants, and this means the universities can be more selective with who they admit.
Remedial classes help bring students up to speed without slowing down students who performed better in high school. It’s always been true that not every student who graduates High School received the same education as their peers who went to a different school. Being behind doesn’t not necessarily mean you’re bound for a doomed college experience.
Students grow up a lot during their college years, and part of that growing up is recognizing this is the time in your life to work hard because it may be your last opportunity to get a quality education.
The students that don’t take advantage of it will drop out, the students that do will have been given an opportunity they otherwise wouldn’t have. It’s all around a good thing to give students more opportunities and let them decide if it’s right for themselves.
>Across all racial and ethnic groups, only Asian students improved in average scores, from 24.5 points in 2018 to 24.7 in 2022. Black students’ composite scores fell from 16.8 to 16.1 points; Hispanic students from 18.8 to 17.7 points; and white students from 22.2 to 21.3 points during that time.
I wonder if there were any earth-shattering global-scale events in that time period that could be skewing the numbers? no, I can't think of any
Not necessarily. At some level you run the risk of not being able to get through college at all. Accreditation requires courses to be conducted at a certain level. In fact as I understand it the correlation to success in college is how the standardized test companies originally sold themselves. My college math advisor was a consultant for one of those companies.
Now, I hope California has included community colleges and trade schools in this program, where some of those students might stand a better chance.
Also, the stuff tested by the tests is pretty remedial to begin with.
The common belief among all Harrison Bergeron referencers is that resources should be concentrated on those who need them the least, because those are the people who have shown merit.
I'm not against it necessarily, but curious about the stats or wisdom on what happens to people who get a free ride like this, as in do they complete university successfully and usefully or do they milk their free room and board and fail out eventually?
Handouts are not generally a great way of accomplishing goals. I don't have a better idea, just thinking if there can be a way to make sure there is some ownership on the part of the students.
When kids first enter foster care, the state assumes care and tries to work with the parents to resolve whatever issues caused the kids to be removed. During this time, the kid ideally stays with another family member or friend, but with a random foster family if not. The parents remain the legal guardians and have opportunities to see their kids, coordinated by the state.
If reunification is determined to be impossible, the state goes to court to sever parental rights. This determination normally takes a year plus, and usually means the parents have checked out or are no longer trying to resolve the issues. Only once parental rights are severed is the child considered "legally free", and is eligible to be adopted into another family. In the ideal case, this is the family they were staying with before parental rights were severed, but not necessarily.
I haven't looked into the details of this article, but I assume these funds will be used for kids that have had parental rights severed, and were either adopted or "age out" of the foster care system.
Once in foster care, most kids are traumatized. Once parental rights are severed, it is incredibly difficult for parents to "re-adopt" their kid. I sure hope no parents are so short sighted to put their child through hell to reduce the cost of college.
The process is a nightmare no sane person would want to get into. It's a nightmare not just for the children. Are you willing to lose all your relationships for free college? To risk losing custody for any other child you may have. now or in the future?
The state only takes care of kids if a court assumes jurisdiction under WIC 300. You can only voluntarily give ups kid within the first few days of birth (this is known as safe surrender https://advokids.org/legal-tools/safe-surrender/) otherwise courts usually assume jurisdiction due to cases of abuse, neglect, abandonment, etc
Not sure how it works in California but where I live you can sign a voluntary termination of parental rights and if you're in a position to consider it they usually won't argue as far as I know.
No, it isn't "free" - and those who actually make the money to support the unlimited taxation that pay for the "free" stuff are actively leaving the tax farm that is California.
It's odd that many of the same people cheering this decision are the same ones crying for meritocracy in the workplace.
Handouts and free passes as long as you're characterized by $some_immutable_trait? Then don't be upset when you're passed over for a promotion to fulfill a company diversity promotion threshold.
There is no shortage of studies verifying babies do not select the families, location or socio-economic conditions they are born into, but the world will treat them as if they chose poorly.
Or look down on them.
It’s funny hearing about the concepts of handouts when the people most offended are too often including those who have access to some amount of privilege but not enough.. and end up upset about sharing it.
There is a lot of easily accessible learning available there for your statement that would help illuminate a bigger picture for you. You are already part way there by being engaged on it.
Mostly about it’s not being about an immutable trait. Knowing this requires you to exert more than a basic interpretation and opinion.
If you don’t think it’s a big deal would you switch positions with someone in that position since it’s so easy?
This doesn't guarantee them a spot at any public university. It guarantees that their education will be paid for at any public university they are admitted to and subsequently matriculate at.
As these things go, the plan was eroded over time, with the (in)famous Proposition 13 of 1978 dealing a big blow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...