re: #240 albusteve

let’s ask the fat cat, unionized, tenured university instructors making a 100k a year…maybe they have some solutions other than massive taxation to preserve the status quo…how do we get the poor into college when the costs are so high and flying upward faster by far than the cost of living?

(1) Textbooks cost too much. From the top down, Universities need to make containing this cost a priority.

(2) The armed forces do, after all, provide college benefits. A poor person can earn the gratitude of the nation, and when they’re done, they’ve got the backing to attend any number of reasonably priced state universities.
With the maturity that people tend to acquire in the service, this path to college is a good bet to result in an actual earned degree.

(3) College really isn’t for everyone. About one-third of the population has that mix of intelligence and drive needed to take good advantage of college. Some of this third with the native ability lack any sort of adequate foundation, and for these, the path to college is either closed, or it takes an arduous route through remedial prep school.

(4) The other two thirds of the population matters! College isn’t the answer, but most people who aren’t the college type have a knack for one kind of work or another and could become skilled workers given some good training. Skilled workers are in far shorter supply than marginal sociology majors, and, not to be crass or anything, but they earn more too. In fact, a good plumber is likely to make more than a non-fat-cat, unionized university instructor. The men and women who carry the bulk of the introductory teaching load are a proletariat of the academy, earning quite modest sums, if they earn more than tuition and fees and a stipend, which is the usual lot of grad students.

As to the higher ranks, 100K isn’t unusual in the higher ranks of any comparable profession. Shall the professors at a medical school make peanuts compared to their recent graduates? What will that do to the quality of instruction, if that becomes the rule?