You are starting to channel “Plan Steve” to force more 14-17 year olds to “solve the lack of minimum wage workers crisis” by pricing them out of secondary education.
Steve
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There’s a chicken and egg issue here. The US expanded free public high school leading to the rise in high school graduation rates. According to wikipedia,
" From 1910 to 1940, high schools grew in number and size, reaching out to a broader clientele. In 1910, for example, 9% of Americans had a high school diploma; in 1935, the rate was 40%. By 1940, the number had increased to 50%."
Making college more affordable and accessible could lead to higher college graduation rates and more wealth and prosperity for everyone. That’s been the argument for public education for 200 years. I’ve yet to read a convincing argument for why universal high school graduation is the target to shoot for, rather than universal college graduation, or sending only select students to high school.
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Throw a couple tidbits in: my grandfather, E J Hall, chief engineer at Hall-Scott, an engine builder in Berkeley, CA, and Jessie Vincent, chief engineer at Packard, all ended their formal education around the 6th grade. Hall and Vincent learned engineering from correspondence courses. They codesigned the Liberty aircraft engine during WWI, as well as a large portfolio of designs, and patents earned, individually.
Kalamazoo made it’s mark in secondary education, defending against a suit by rich old phartz who didn’t want to pay for anyone else’s education. The High School I went to has a historical marker in the front yard, because it is on the same site as the original, publicly funded, Kalamazoo High School, that started the flap.
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Nearly everyone goes to high school not only (or even mainly) because it is free - they all go because it is mandatory. We know that making college free would not lead to everyone going to college, because there are lots of countries in which college is free (or nearly so), and they don’t have college enrollment or educational attainment rates that are appreciably different from ours.
And there are two very good reasons that neither we nor any other nation makes college attendance mandatory. The first is because college-age students are adults. They’re no longer minors who will be living at home. They’re grown adults. They now have to pay for their own food, clothes, transportation, housing, and a host of other things that are no longer being provided for them by their parents. And the second is that unlike high school, college education is no longer covering basic skills that nearly all jobs (and basic citizenship) require. It’s an advanced education, and not every path through life needs to have them - or benefits by giving up several years of other opportunities in order to get them.
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Given the recent trend, in several states, to allow 14-16 year-olds to work more hours, in more types of jobs, to ease the “minimum wage worker shortage crisis”, I figure the next step is to lower mandatory school attendance to 8th grade, ie, just enough of the “three Rs” for menial work.
Steve
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Losers and Sycophants.
I challenge the notion that we necessarily need more college graduates or that it necessarily leads to increased prosperity. I think we need a lot more highly skilled labor than we need another person with a random business degree. A trained electrician makes more than many college graduates.
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How about more prosperity for the college graduates, because they are not carving off a significant part of their income to pay a five figure student loan?
Steve
But…they’re the ones who are already the more prosperous members of society. They’re the haves, not the have-nots, at the level of generality that underlies these types of policy decisions. They’re the ones that have the higher incomes, that can afford to pay back the five-figure cost of their education. Not everyone can go to college, and not everyone chooses to go to college, and the ones that go have much higher incomes than the ones that don’t. Sure, the college grads would be richer if they could get the public to subsidize more of their already-advantaged economic position…but is increasing that subsidy further really good public policy?
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Actually, high school is no longer “free”, at least in Michigan. It was when I was in high school. In my senior year, a court decision lead to not only not paying anything resembling tuition, we no longer had to dig into our own pocket for books or supplies. Everything was provided, free.
As the (L&Ses) in Lansing progressively underfunded education in the state, public school systems started dropping skills classes, like wood shop, auto shop, metal shop, and driver’s ed. They also started charging a fee to play sports, as sports are an “extra-curricular” activity, not a core mission of the schools.
Last winter, with great fanfare, Farmington Hills Public, announced that the fees to play sports were all being dropped. For some reason, I decided to look in the Farmington Hills high school course catalog. The school charges a fee for nearly every academic class. If you want to take most “book learning” classes, you need to pay a fee of $10-$15, per class. The highest fee I saw was for debate: $160. But football is free, in spite of the facilities, equipment, and transportation costs incurred.
Our understanding of economics tells us that, if you make something more expensive, you get less of it. If you make something cheaper, or free, you get more of it. Clearly, the priority at Farmington Hills Public, is more football, less education. Seems designed to produce an ignorant, backward, population, to me, but this is Shiny-land.
Steve
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Some go to a for-profit trade school, and also have a huge student debt. Some of those trade schools were outright frauds, that built their business model around scooping up student loan money, while providing glaringly substandard training, to maximize their profits.
Steve
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University of michigan tuition $16,000
UCLA tuition $13,000
Harvard tuition $55,000
USC $61,000
Tufts tuitions $63,000
University Hamberg tuition $0.0
tuition is free in Norway
Tokyo Institute of Technology tuition $5,000
Keio University (Minato City, Tokyo) $6,500
University of Lausanne tuition $800
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