What happens to the 99%?

Oh sure, but I was talking tuition in my first post.

Room and board is expensive, much better to live off campus with a few roommates and cook your own food to save money. Wasn't about the same at all in my experience, but was much cheaper both in rent and money spent on food.
 
But you have to stay somewhere of course, so even if your rent and utilities cost around half of what it would to live in a dorm you're looking at an additional $3,500-$4,000 a year, so something around $12,000 a year including tuition at an in-state public university - $48,000 for 4 years prior to paying for everything other than tuition and room and board.
 
[quote name='SpazX']But you have to stay somewhere of course, so even if your rent and utilities cost around half of what it would to live in a dorm you're looking at an additional $3,500-$4,000 a year, so something around $12,000 a year including tuition at an in-state public university - $48,000 for 4 years prior to paying for everything other than tuition and room and board.[/QUOTE]

Sure, it's not cheap. But we should also probably factor in that most kids from middle class and up families probably have college funds their parents saved up as well to pay at least part of the costs. And kids from lower income families will be eligible for grants, work studies etc. to get some of the costs down.

For me it was cheaper than that though. Tuition was around $4,500 a year. My rent was $150 or so a month throughout, probably spent $100 if that on food a month. So I was more around $7-8 a year. Would be probably $2K or so higher now with the tuition increase and rents being a bit higher (still cheap around WVU though).


But in any case, I stick by my original post. No one should take on student loan debt for undergrad unless they're getting a degree required for their desired career (engineering, law school etc.). The college experience, learning for learning's sake etc. is wonderful. But not worth it to take on debt to get a social science degree etc. if you're not planning on grad school etc. as that's not going to help you much on the job market by itself. All the more reason to study hard in high school so you can get scholarships right from the get go if you just want to get the college experience.
 
dmaul, you would be surprised at the types of jobs requesting (if not outright requiring) bachelor degrees, remember the goal isn't to exclude as many as people as possible and neither should someone be ashamed for not having their shit together at 14-16 years old.
 
I remember going on a tour of Vanderbilt when I was around 12-13 years old, even now that seems weird, what kid is even thinking about colleges at that age? Not sure how they thought we'd pay for it either, not like we were from some high priced private school, we were from a school in a lower to middle class area.
 
[quote name='Msut77']dmaul, you would be surprised at the types of jobs requesting (if not outright requiring) bachelor degrees, remember the goal isn't to exclude as many as people as possible and neither should someone be ashamed for not having their shit together at 14-16 years old.[/QUOTE]

For sure. But there's not much that can be done. Tuition isn't going to be lowered as costs are always going up--especially with the mess most state budgets are in. And there's not a lot of fat still to be cut in most state higher ed budgets after the big cut backs in recent years.

The best bet is to just do more of these state lottery funded scholarships for B and above students so any decent student can go for free to state schools. You have to put some of the responsibility on students (and parents)--it's pretty damn easy to get a B average in high school and college.

If they can't hack the b-average they have to pay their own/take loans way until they do better and earn scholarships. Just the way it is. I'd never support giving a free ride to college to anyone. All ready for too many students on Hope scholarships here that clearly aren't B-students. College isn't for everyone, and only those proving themselves at at least a B level in the class room deserve free rides.
 
So I am curious, if students are going to incur so much debt by taking on student loans anyway, why doesn't the government stop guarenteeing or giving out student loans all together while making it harder for private loans to be handed out as well?

If the loopholes are closed right, wouldn't this effectively lower the cost of college because noone could afford to go? Once the artificial demand of $7000 a semester goes down colleges will be desperate to get students in the classroom, students could afford to pay for themselves, and students wouldn't have that debt on top of their head. Or are we still believing colleges are too poor to lower the tuition? Or would provide an unfair advantage to the wealthy who are really going to go either way.
 
dmaul,

One solution would be to make sure there are more actual livelihoods to be had for those without college educations.

I mean even with all the talk of too many people going to college *only* about a little less than a third of the workforce has a 4 year degree and there is no logical to exclude what amounts to the majority from being able to make a living.
 
For sure. Though one can definitely make a good living in construction, plumbing, electrician, mechanic and other skilled trades. If one doesn't have some marketable skill--be it an intellectual skill from education or a skilled trade they are going to struggle since they're going after jobs literally pretty much anyone can do. Not much the government can do to help provide livelihoods to people who didn't make themselves marketable in any way.

Granted with the economy being down the trades--especially construction--are struggling. But so are white collar positions as businesses cut back.
 
Not much the government can do to help provide livelihoods to people who didn't make themselves marketable in any way.
Click to expand...

Ideally there are solutions that would provide a living and training.

Anyway the skilled trades, especially by me but basically all over the country have waiting lists years long... that is if you know someone even to get on the lists in the first place.
 
Sure. I've long argued that receiving welfare should be paired with required job training programs to help get people off welfare.
 
[quote name='dmaul1114']Not much the government can do to help provide livelihoods to people who didn't make themselves marketable in any way.[/QUOTE]

Sure there is.

Strip away the welfare on agriculture.
Strip away the mileage exemption.
Strip away the subsidy on child care.
Kill the h1b1 visa program.
 
[quote name='dmaul1114']Sure. I've long argued that receiving welfare should be paired with required job training programs to help get people off welfare.[/QUOTE]

job training is just a meaningless expense if there is no job at the end of the training. But hey, the government can just hire 1 guy to dig a ditch and another one to follow him and fill the fucker back up with dirt...
 
Very true. But at least if they get some skills of some sort they're more marketable for job positions and have at least somewhat improved their chances of getting off welfare vs. having just got the money and nothing else and still being an unskilled laborer with no education etc.
 
How we got here and more:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/slump-goes-why/

"In the United States, conventional banking was increasingly supplanted by a variety of alternatives, these days usually grouped together as “shadow banking.” For example, many businesses began parking their money not in bank deposits but in “repo” (repurchase) agreements—very short-term loans to hedge funds and investment banks. Repo yielded higher interest rates than ordinary deposits, because its issuers weren’t bound by the reserve requirements or other rules that applied to conventional banks. But it wasn’t government-guaranteed, and it was therefore subject to crises of confidence. Runs on repo brought down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. And by many estimates, by 2007 repo and other forms of shadow banking accounted for about 60 percent of the overall US banking system—yet shadow banking remained largely unregulated and unsecured. “It’s little wonder,” write Roubini and Mihm, “that the shadow banking system was at the heart of what would become the mother of all bank runs.”"


fuck all being done:

http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/09/07/rome-is-burning/

"We have very low capacity utilization (75%) and very high unemployment (10%).

That is, we have factories sitting idle for lack of workers – low capacity utilization. At the same time we have workers sitting idle for lack of factories – high unemployment.

There are machines waiting to be worked and people waiting to work them but they are not getting together. The labor market is failing to clear.

This is a fucking disaster.

Excuse my language, but you have to get that this is a big deal. This is not a big deal like the GOP doesn’t appreciate public goods. Or, Democrats don’t understand incentives. Or some other such second order debate that could reasonably concern us in different times.

This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Let me say that again because I think it fails to sink in – literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced. Not misallocated. Not spent on programs you don’t approve of or distributed in tax cuts you don’t like. Trillions of dollars in value are not produced at all. Gone from the world entirely. Never to be had, by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pure unadulterated loss."

The results.

http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2266026/?from=rss


Income distribution remained roughly stable through the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have termed this midcentury era the "Great Compression." The deep nostalgia for that period felt by the World War II generation—the era of Life magazine and the bowling league—reflects something more than mere sentimentality. Assuming you were white, not of draft age, and Christian, there probably was no better time to belong to America's middle class.
The Great Compression ended in the 1970s. Wages stagnated, inflation raged, and by the decade's end, income inequality had started to rise. Income inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts. In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, the Nobel laureate, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labeled the post-1979 epoch the "Great Divergence."
 
[quote name='Msut77']"We have very low capacity utilization (75%) and very high unemployment (10%).

That is, we have factories sitting idle for lack of workers – low capacity utilization. At the same time we have workers sitting idle for lack of factories – high unemployment.

There are machines waiting to be worked and people waiting to work them but they are not getting together. The labor market is failing to clear.
[/QUOTE]


I'm thinking that it's more lack of demand than factories sitting because they don't have the workers. Auto makers were perhaps the worst of producing way more product than the market could handle which made no sense from a business perspective. Create more cars than you sell... flood the market and then rely on incentives to get people to purchase last years model which is nearly identical to this years. Rinse and repeat.
 
He mentions a skills mismatch as being one argument but doesn't say much else. I'd say that's at least some of the issue.
 
[quote name='Afflicted']I'm thinking that it's more lack of demand than factories sitting because they don't have the workers. [/quote]

He doesn't mean they can't find workers willing to you know work.

The problem is no one is willing to pay them to work because of the demand problem.

Caused by people being out work.
 
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