Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 4925 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine)
| Message 57 of 64 20 December 2010 at 6:45pm | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
Or that should be the case. Implicit in the threshold for payback of loans is the admission
that some degrees are not of great value. The problem is the existance of these so-called "Mickey Mouse" degrees.
Replace them with a more appropriate means of vocational training and the funding problem will be ended.
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I wholeheartedly agree. Instead of funding degrees like Surf of Golf Studies whose graduates are (imho) unlikely to
even be able to repay the loan upon graduation, they could free some money for "real" courses.
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leafhound Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4900 days ago 6 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Spanish
| Message 58 of 64 20 December 2010 at 7:50pm | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
HenryMW wrote:
Letting people pay for the services they use is not an evil. |
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No, but the end result is that parents pay for the services, when it is the students that are the users. The student is therefore not at university purely on his own merits, but partly down to the good fortune to be born to well-off parents. That ain't right. |
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100% agreed.
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Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5156 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish*
| Message 59 of 64 20 December 2010 at 10:50pm | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
There is nothing irrational about recognising that there is no economic growth without economic investment. The net worth of graduates to society is greater than the cost. |
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Education expenditures is not a determinant of economic growth. Macroeconomic stability is. According to some estimates, China ranked 172nd in education expenditures as a percentage of GDP ten years ago. Cuba is 1st in the world. Guess which one has been more successful in eradicating poverty over the last quarter of a century? The former has also limited redistribution policies to a minimum.
We have a science that studies all these phenomena called economics. Seems Europeans have never heard of it.
By the policies you're advocating the only thing you'll accomplish is to boast of physicists driving taxicabs and linguists serving as doormen - if not out of work altogether, as the audaciously hopeful, hapless North Americans are waking to discover.
Edited by Juаn on 21 December 2010 at 12:54am
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jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5229 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian
| Message 60 of 64 20 December 2010 at 10:56pm | IP Logged |
palfrey wrote:
What is the situation in Scotland and Wales? Will they be able to avoid
what England is going through? Or do some hard decisions lie ahead for them as well?
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For the moment they will stay with the current systems they have. If you are a Scottish
student going to a Scottish university, you get your fees paid for with no payback
required by the Student Awards Agency for Scotland. However, if a Scottish student were
to go to a university outside Scotland they will not have their fees paid for free and
will need to pay them back. Not too sure about the Welsh system.
This change sets a precedent and could result in a similar approach being taken in
Scotland and Wales toward tuition fees. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
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HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4985 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew
| Message 61 of 64 20 December 2010 at 11:15pm | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
HenryMW wrote:
Letting people pay for the services they use is not an evil.
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No, but the end result is that parents pay for the services, when it is the students that are the users. The
student is therefore not at university purely on his own merits, but partly down to the good fortune to be
born to well-off parents. That ain't right. |
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In a free society, people aren't going to be all the same. It's not a bad thing. I don't know about Europe but
in the US if you get accepted to a university there is money for you if you're worth it. Loans, scholarships,
work-study. It's there. If you want it you have to earn it, though. I worked in collge and you can too. Some
people have it given to them, but there is a big difference between voluntary payments from parents and
coerced payments from the rest of society. I didn't begrudge people at my $45k/year university who had
parents paying for them. I was there on scholarship (with some loans and work-study). They still had to get
admitted.
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michau Tetraglot Groupie Norway lang-8.com/member/49 Joined 6037 days ago 86 posts - 135 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, NorwegianC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish, Sign Language Studies: Burmese, Toki Pona, Greenlandic
| Message 62 of 64 21 December 2010 at 12:03am | IP Logged |
HenryMW wrote:
I didn't begrudge people at my $45k/year university who had parents paying for them. I was there on scholarship (with some loans and work-study). They still had to get admitted. |
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Well, $45k/year for five years is a price of a small flat here in Oslo (which is said to be one of the world's most expensive cities), so it sounds like a lot. Can everyone who is admitted receive scholarship, or only some percentage of the best students? How much of the amount does the scholarship cover?
Edited by michau on 21 December 2010 at 12:06am
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James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5186 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French
| Message 63 of 64 21 December 2010 at 2:20am | IP Logged |
Most of the expensive schools in the US get financial info from the student and parents and then base discounts and many scholarships on historic elasticity data. It is essentially a way to have multiple prices depending on ability to pay. The better schools, the more inelastic the price/demand and thus the ridiculously high sticker prices. They have waiting lists and adjust the discounts/scholarships accordingly as their capacity fills up. Most of them have very separate admissions and financial offices so admissions are based entirely on merit.
Juan, great point about Cuba, but I am unsure about China's "communist capitalism." By the way, are you, by chance, aware of any good Economics treatises/texts that have a Spanish audio book? I have been looking forever and cannot find anything.
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Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6349 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 64 of 64 21 December 2010 at 5:27am | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
HenryMW wrote:
Letting people pay for the services they use is not an evil. |
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No, but the end result is that parents pay for the services, when it is the students that are the users. The student is therefore not at university purely on his own merits, but partly down to the good fortune to be born to well-off parents. That ain't right. |
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It's more of a corruption against the integrity of the university rather than being unfair to the student. Students are admitted for a multitude of reasons, not just academic scores. There are many factors that are out of the students' control that are factors for scholarship/admission.
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