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Higher education should be free to the student. We should be aiming for 70-80% of the populace being university educated and another 10-20% having gone through trade schools. In the long run, education pays back society far more than it costs.
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Higher education should be free to the student. We should be aiming for 70-80% of the populace being university educated and another 10-20% having gone through trade schools. In the long run, education pays back society far more than it costs.
I would argue that we need a much higher percentage than 10-20% going through trade schools. The economy still needs people to build things and the fine arts, political science, theoretical hard sciences will not provide much help in that matter. In a manufacturing, resource extraction, construction environment you will need far more trades people than engineers, managers, documentation professionals to efficiently move the product. All having 70-80% of the population go through university does is have more general studies graduates serve burgurs and push brooms.
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Higher education should be free to the student. We should be aiming for 70-80% of the populace being university educated and another 10-20% having gone through trade schools. In the long run, education pays back society far more than it costs.
Overly simplistic and really obscure percentages. I presume that in your utopia 70-80% of the population is intelligent enough to go to University (I don't think that percentage graduate from high school even) and that robots replace the common labourer, the people who do the relatively smaller, menial jobs - working in a phone centre, retail outlet, drive a truck. The fact is that while sponsoring a university education does have dividends for the country, there surely is a plateau for these returns.
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Higher education should be free to the student. We should be aiming for 70-80% of the populace being university educated and another 10-20% having gone through trade schools. In the long run, education pays back society far more than it costs.
Where are all the jobs going to come from? As it is right now, a lot of people with university degrees end up working low paying jobs. More people in university just means more people with university education will be working at MacDonald's.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
I wonder how many of the "I'm a taxpayer and I already spend enough of my hard earned tax dollars on post-secondary education funding" crowd attended university in the 1970s and 80s?
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Where universities get their money (as % of total operating revenue):
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"Life of Russian hockey veterans is very hard," said Soviet hockey star Sergei Makarov. "Most of them don't have enough to eat these days. These old players are Russian legends."
I really think all university students should be given a simple lesson on the decreasing value of a degree. A cheap and easily affordable education means increased enrollment and graduation, further diluting the workforce with degrees. A degree now is what a high school education was 40 years ago, and it seems post grad work is now the new standard for separating yourself from the masses. Something is valuable because of its rarity, and the inability of grads, particularly those with liberal arts degrees, to gain meaningful employment is a result of the decreasing value of a degree.
How many students go to university, and take something that is completely unmarketable, redundant, or purposely useless? How many engineers, statisticians, or business students are in that crowd? More-so, how many serious social, and natural scientists are in that crowd?
I did my MA in Political Science. I did so because I love the political world, and the human traits that are exhibited there-in. I chose political science over other more-marketable options that were available to me, such as economics or business. However, I didn't fool myself into believing that I could learn incredibly theoretical stuff and have it transfer seamlessly over to the real world. From the beginning, I wanted to have a job when I graduated. That meant focusing on statistics, and methodologies, stakeholder problems, natural resource extraction, and aboriginal affairs. So many students think that university is a period to "discover yourself." Yes, that is partially true. You will get to discover parts of yourself within the luxury of the mainly sedentary student lifestyle. Don't fool yourself. Many parts of the student life are so incredibly easy compared to the real world that you will have a lot of time to figure some things out about yourself. Also, you will be able to excusably drink far more than you could under real-life circumstances. I also met my future wife in grad school. This was a life bonus.
However, so many students fool themselves into thinking that "higher education" automatically translates into something better for themselves, and society. The fact is, most of what goes on in university is so functionally pathetic, it is basically like a playground for unrealistic people.
Expense won't keep an engineering student out, because they know that an oil company exists to pay them a wage commensurate with the investment made into his education. Maybe higher education will keep the potential queer/cultural/film studies out of university. This is a very good thing.
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If it makes you feel better, I graduated in 2005 and had no issue paying for tuition and such while living at home and spending 2.5 hours a day on Calgary Transit.
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Higher education should be free to the student. We should be aiming for 70-80% of the populace being university educated and another 10-20% having gone through trade schools. In the long run, education pays back society far more than it costs.
This is just plain idiocy. What indexes are you basing these ridiculous opinions on? We already are facing a severe trades shortage. There is no shortage of Starbucks baristas.
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I wonder how many of the "I'm a taxpayer and I already spend enough of my hard earned tax dollars on post-secondary education funding" crowd attended university in the 1970s and 80s?
I would be interested to see non-percentage numbers though. The student body has increased as well, not to mention foreign students who pay higher tuition rates than Canadians. Is that factored into the numbers.
If you have the government supply 8 dollars and a single student 2 dollars the government is supplying 80% of the operating income. If you have the government supply 9 dollars but not you have two students who each pay 2 dollars, the government while supplying more money is also supplying less as a percentage of the operating income (now 69.2%).... Interesting statistics but without context are pretty useless.
Higher education should be free to the student. We should be aiming for 70-80% of the populace being university educated and another 10-20% having gone through trade schools. In the long run, education pays back society far more than it costs.
I'm not completely on board with the percentages (although as technology advances, the need for trade schools to be augmented with a form of higher education is growing), but I'm completely behind you on the "education should be free" thing.
I do wish student loans were given to everyone, it seems the lower middle class gets kind of jammed on these things and it's not like those go away by declaring bankruptcy, it's like herpes, those loans are with you for life.
If I recall correctly a household income of ~100k wouldn't qualify a child for a student loan, but realistically that's ~70k of after tax income and if you have two kids in University you are spending 22% of your take home income on tuition and books, that's pretty substantial when you consider things like rent, food etc...
I will also point out that outside of professional faculties, there is no reason that a student can't have a part time job to help pay for tuition....none and no reason they can't work through summer. Backpacking through Europe is not a right.
I would be interested to see non-percentage numbers though. The student body has increased as well, not to mention foreign students who pay higher tuition rates than Canadians. Is that factored into the numbers.
If you have the government supply 8 dollars and a single student 2 dollars the government is supplying 80% of the operating income. If you have the government supply 9 dollars but not you have two students who each pay 2 dollars, the government while supplying more money is also supplying less as a percentage of the operating income (now 69.2%).... Interesting statistics but without context are pretty useless.
Ok, but I think it provides some explanation why students are angry (which is the point of the thread): they are paying more (and likely are receiving less [in terms of the value of their degree.])
Now, perhaps the answer is that we should have less people attending universities and receiving post-secondary degrees. However, I think we should think long and hard about all of the consequences of that sort of decision.
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"Life of Russian hockey veterans is very hard," said Soviet hockey star Sergei Makarov. "Most of them don't have enough to eat these days. These old players are Russian legends."
Higher education should be free to the student. We should be aiming for 70-80% of the populace being university educated and another 10-20% having gone through trade schools. In the long run, education pays back society far more than it costs.
That doesn't leave a lot of people to clean my toilets and pour my beer.
I do wish student loans were given to everyone, it seems the lower middle class gets kind of jammed on these things and it's not like those go away by declaring bankruptcy, it's like herpes, those loans are with you for life.
If I recall correctly a household income of ~100k wouldn't qualify a child for a student loan, but realistically that's ~70k of after tax income and if you have two kids in University you are spending 22% of your take home income on tuition and books, that's pretty substantial when you consider things like rent, food etc...
I believe they removed parental income for student loans recently.
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One other thing to consider is that cheaper tuition alone does not guarantee greater access to education. Subsidizing tuition solely from the taxpayer means that without major increases in education funding, fewer spots become available over time. This leads to increased competition for those fewer spots and less access for everyone as a whole. Tying tuition increases to inflation helps to lessen this burden on taxpayers, but there is still a limited amount of money to go around for these spaces.
On this note, we focus way too much on forcing people to go to university in this country. There are many forms of post-secondary education from trade school to community college that would be way more useful to providing a strong workforce for our economy. Not everyone can or should go to university, but we need to ensure that if they choose to go that route and have the non-monetary entrance requirements that they should be able to.
Hey there, slow down with that rational thought! This is about riots and stuff
I do wish student loans were given to everyone, it seems the lower middle class gets kind of jammed on these things and it's not like those go away by declaring bankruptcy, it's like herpes, those loans are with you for life.
Tell me about it. I have been paying mine off for the past 7 years and have 3 more to go. If I knew then what I knew now, I would have gone in a different direction. I know people that took 2 years at college and make more than $100,000/year. University is for suckers.
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