2020 Presidential Election

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Yes, I am well known as a big fan of Scott Walker.

Sent from my LG G6 using Tapatalk

[yovargas]

That's surprising, I wouldn't have expected you to be a fan of such an avant-garde musician.

[Impenitent]

Pete Buttigieg looks good to me.

I will be voting in Washington, actually, in the Australian Embassy. Federal election is on during our rambles


Typed on a tiny phone keyboard on Tapatalk - typos inevitable.

[Frelga]

This seems to be a pretty good review of the Democratic options.
https://twitter.com/RafiDAngelo/status/ ... 4348010496

Buttigeig: I'm a basic white guy candidate BUT GAY.

Biden: I was your favorite President's best friend.

O'Rourke: I was in a band.

Liz Warren: Student loan forgiveness, free public college, $50 billion set aside for HBCUs.

Voters: Hard choice, which white guy should we pick?

[River]

I'm down for a Warrren-Buttigeig ticket. Don't really care how the names are arranged. We need people with ideas. Warren's got good ones and, of the men, Buttigeig is the one talking most about plans.

You can also swap Buttigeig with Hickenlooper. Hick doesn't check all the progressive boxes but I liked the work he did in Colorado.

[Frelga]

Buttigeig/Hickenlooper does have the best name combination going for them.

[elengil]

This seems to be a pretty good review of the Democratic options.

Voters: Hard choice, which white guy should we pick?

*twitch twitch*

[Túrin Turambar]

To be honest, I'd be surprised if Senator Warren's campaign recovered at this point. We can argue about the merits or demerits of the whole ticking the Native American box on the law school form thing, but it didn't help her one bit to have the start of her run dominated by it. Plus it's a crowded field, and she's competing directly with Senator Sanders for the same voters, and he has the advantage of having an established campaign machine from 2016. On current polling she's behind Biden, Sanders, Harris and O'Rourke, and is likely soon to fall behind Buttigieg.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I tend to agree, which is a shame because I think she is the most idea-driven candidate, and most of her ideas are (in my opinion, of course), good ideas. But it is really hard to predict what will happen with such a crazy overloaded field. I have a hard time believing that Buttigieg will sustain his momentum, but I certainly would rather see him play the role of inexperienced spoiler than Beto, who I think is mostly flash and not much substance. I like most of what I have heard from Buttigieg, though I doubt his electability.

I still think that Harris (not Walker ) has the temperament, experience and personality to take on Mr. Trump, and her positions probably align as well at least with mine as any of the candidates, so she continues to be my no. 1 choice. One factor that I have not seen many people mention is that the California primary is early in the season this year (on Super Tuesday, March 3) so she is very likely to be one of the leaders moving into the rest of the primary season, assuming she can carry her home state (though Bernie is probably likely to give her a run for her money).

[Frelga]

I see a lot of discourse on Warren's plans for free college education, and I gotta be honest - I am where I am today thanks to the free (and in retrospect, excellent) education I got back in the USSR. Not only was the college free, we were paid a stipend that would allow me to not starve even if I didn't live with my parents.

There is no other way I could have started with literally nothing and be earning enough to pay a ton of taxes only a few years later.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Yes, that is definitely one of those "good" ideas that I was referring to!

[yovargas]

As a general aside, and without knowing the specifics of anyone's plans - I can definitely get behind the idea of the govt funding higher education in principle, but in practice it makes me nervous because we have the terrible and poorly understood problem of constantly skyrocketing university costs way beyond normal inflation. Until we figure out why that's happening and how to stop it, I'm not sure tax payers should be on the hook for those soaring costs. (Specially when it's not because the teachers are the ones getting all that extra money.)


I have similar concerns with govt funded health care but that seems to be a case where dramatically simplifying the system with single payer would possibly reduce a lot of the crazy inefficiency causing our absurdly expensive health care.

[Frelga]

It's skyrocketing because colleges serve as class gatekeepers. And I don't mean college class.

Next question?

[elengil]

I'm not sure tax payers should be on the hook for those soaring costs.

If I understand correctly, government funding is for public colleges and universities - like community colleges. Not for any and every private college. Basically making some kind of college education available to anyone, but not necessarily opening up Ivy League for example - they'd still have pretty high standards for entrance anyway.

[yovargas]

It's skyrocketing because colleges serve as class gatekeepers. And I don't mean college class.

Not sure what you mean by this. Can you clarify?

If I understand correctly, government funding is for public colleges and universities - like community colleges.

Are those not having the same cost issues as others? Genuine question, I don't know.

[elengil]

It's skyrocketing because colleges serve as class gatekeepers. And I don't mean college class.

Not sure what you mean by this. Can you clarify?

If I understand correctly, government funding is for public colleges and universities - like community colleges.

Are those not having the same cost issues as others? Genuine question, I don't know.

I admit to not having a full understanding, though similar to medical costs one might think that if the government is funding, they would set restrictions on how much they would pay.

As for Frelga's comment, that strikes a much clearer chord. By raising tuition costs sky-high, you can prevent the "type of people" you don't want to get ahead in life from getting ahead in life. Keep the distinction of class and rank divided as much as possible, prevent the peasants from rising above their station, etc. It's a very old medieval mindset of you are born to a certain social position and you'll likely die in that position, self-betterment goes against god's order for the world. etc etc blah blah blah.

[River]

Yov, public universities and community colleges have been getting pricier and pricier partially because public funding has been drying up and they need to make up the shortfall somehow and partially because they can. It's normal to take out loans to pay for higher ed and those loans are not dischargable through bankruptcy, which means that they are, for the lenders, low-risk (note: that doesn't mean that people don't encounter idiotic hoops when applying). So voters keep declining to vote in people and policies that could restore public funding and the lenders loan out money to meet the soaring costs regardless of what the student is studying and how likely they are to finish and get a good job to pay off the loan and the schools keep jacking up the price because apparently the market can bear it and here we are. The universities also, for reasons of their own, find it appealing to hire lots of administrators and pay them absurd amounts of money while raising the price on students and dumping cost cutting measures, hiring freezes, raise freezes, and so on on the faculty and staff.

If I sound bitter, remember that I was in academia for a while. I saw it happening. Things really started getting insane after I was finished with college. My parents put away a load of money and I won a very healthy merit scholarship at a private school. I got through debt-free. If I were ten years younger, I'm not sure that would have been possible just because tuitions everywhere exploded and have continued to explode. Back around 2011 or 2012, I got a university-wide email from the chancellors about how, even though raises and hiring were frozen because of blah blah blah, they were getting raises because they were working so hard (post-docs are on the faculty mailing list, which is how I found out about this). In-state at the local university, the place I could send my children, is expected to top $60K/year by the time my kindergartner is ready to go. There is a reason why, even though my husband and I are by no means strapped for cash, we don't wear pretty clothes and drive a fancy cars or otherwise indulge in outward status symbols. There is a reason why we dress the kindergartener in her second cousin's hand-me downs and the baby in the kindergartener's hand-me downs. We don't want to chain them up in debt before their lives even start.

There are a lot of things that need to happen to turn this around. My mother paid her tuition at a state school by selling a couple cows she raised. This was back in the early 70's. That won't work anymore and it's not just because of inflation. If we want to get back to that, we need to make some changes to how the education market is operating.

[Dave_LF]

Thesis: tuition went though the roof for the same reason housing did in the early 00s--buyers kept demonstrating they were willing and able to borrow more and more to meet whatever price was asked, so sellers had no motivation whatsoever to keep costs down. If so, I'd expect making more loans available more easily would only make the problem worse, but maybe offering competition in the form of a publicly-funded option which is required by law to cost this much and no more could help.

[Túrin Turambar]

Australia had free higher education from 1974 to 1989, with students able to claim a study allowance to live on. Both major parties came to the view the system was unsustainable in the long run. Anecdotally, I had heard from people who were studying at the time that quality standards were harder to enforce (because the education was free, after all) and it wasn’t uncommon for people to make a career of studying (e.g. I knew someone who studied with someone who was in the eighth year of an arts degree).

In 1989 the system was changed so part of the tuition fee became an interest-fee loan you pay back once your income crosses a certain threshold. I like the new system a lot, because nobody is excluded from studying because of fees, it seems fair to me that because education has both a public and private benefit the cost should be split, it provides more of an incentive for course completion and for students to push for better quality teaching, if you get no financial benefit from your degree you pay nothing, but it also seems more equitable that someone who does very well out of higher education should bear some of the cost.

The downside is that the universities don’t actually bear any consequences for enrolling large numbers of students in courses with few job prospects, and making questionable claims in their advertising to get them there. This is more of a problem in vocational and trade courses than university degrees, but it’s still an issue. Australia now has about a quarter as many law students as practicing lawyers, because law is a lucrative course to teach (no labs, high fees) and there’s no reason not enrol anyone who comes along. If they turn out ten times as many graduates in a field as the market needs, there’s no consequence for them, but there is for the graduate and the taxpayer. If we could fix this, probably by capping the number of Government-supported places, then I think the system would be close to ideal.

[River]

Túrin, this has some parallels with STEM grad programs in the US. Tuition for PhDs is covered with a monthly stipend. Through the 80's and 90's, a phenomenon some called the 6-year and others called the 8-year creep set in. It wasn't so much that the students didn't want to leave (though there was some of that) as the advisors didn't want to surrender their cheap labor. After year 3, a doctoral student isn't learning anything new. They're just cranking out data. They've learned/written the protocols and mastered the techniques. And they cost way less than a technician. In the life sciences, the funding agencies started cracking down. The NIH offers a number of training grants that universities love to win and offer to students. In return, they expect the universities to at least make a show of getting PhD students graduated in four years. It's not exactly the most feasible goal but it does put the pressure on the faculty to not exploit their students. And the NIH program officers that come around are pretty upfront about their expectations. I was point-blank asked when I was graduating as a third year. In the physical sciences, the funding agencies don't seem to have gotten so active - I saw plenty of 6+ year PhD students when I was a post-doc in the physics department. The university as a whole also instituted some rules about how long doctoral students can stay, though the paperwork burden isn't so onerous that advisors don't make use of the waivers and such on a routine basis.

I think the simplest way to prevent abuse is to cap the number of credits funded for a given undergraduate degree (setting the limit on credit hours instead of terms gives leeway to students who want or need a part time schedule, or who have to suspend their studies for a period of time). This could end up being a problem for people who want to change majors or fields, but if you set it up right, there can be a way to accommodate those who've honestly changed their minds vs. those who just want to stay in school forever.