I still will not support a minimum wage of this type. There are way too many variables. Do you have the same minimum wage for an engineer living in Minden Nebraska compared to New York City?
I agree with the bolded.
This idea is one that sounds great....but, in reality, it would be a disaster.
Problem is, if we make college free and most everybody gets a degree, then companies will just implement some other hurdle to weed out the undesirables. If it's free, it's not worth anything.
People still have to be accepted and graduate, and as has been mentioned, there could be a limit on how many years they have to do so, otherwise they have to start paying. The degrees wouldn’t suddenly be handed out to everyone. They just wouldn’t cost $.
I don’t think the hiring of graduates has much to do with how much the degree cost them.
Starting on Jan. 1, 1978, the minimum wage was $2.65. Someone working at the minimum wage for 13 weeks, and 40 hours per week, in the summer of 1978 would have ended up with $1,378 for their labors.
For the tuition they would have faced in the 1978-79 school year, we turned to figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal government’s repository of education data.
The cost of tuition and fees (in that year’s dollars, not adjusted for inflation) was $688 for in-state residents attending a four-year, public university.
This is where I'm at. Not free tuition, but a reduction to make it more feasible for students to attendDo we start paying athletes then?Sorry for the tangent comment.
The more I think about it, I'm not sure free is the way to go. I'd like to go back to something like this:
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/aug/08/facebook-posts/1978-someone-minimum-wage-could-earn-enough-summer/
You could work the summer only and afford to go to school debt free (minus books/tuition) you could then scale down during the school year to part time to hours and afford books/tuition and graduate debt free. And of course if you go out of state, it would be a jump in tuition.
This way, a student still has some skin in the game, as has been brought up, would still have to academically qualify, etc etc. It would still place value on the degree and not burden society as a whole. Using 1978 percentages, that would mean, in today's world the average cost per year for tuition and fees for in-state residents attending a 4-year university would be just shy of $1,850. I would love to figure out a way to get close to that...maybe $5000 yr
I little bit of a tangent - but is it really insane for a teacher to earn $80K? Obviously there is a regional component here, but I'd argue that his profession is highly underpaid, and it could be easily debated that without a solid education starting early kids never make it to the point of choosing college or trade school.I like this in theory a lot but there's no way it could work. There are too many jobs that employers need to have some kind of shortcut towards understanding competency (which is what a degree is) that couldn't possibly pay that amount of money.
Like, it's important for a school to know that a 2nd grade teacher knows how to do their job correctly. But it'd be insane for most 2nd grade teachers to make eighty grand.
Free college is estimated to cost $60-75 billion per year. The defense budget increased by more than $133 billion (23% increase) under Trump and the GOP Congress. If we can increase the defense budget without a "how do we pay for this?" debate, then we can pay for free college. At the very least, we could use the defense budget increase for free college instead (and still have tens of billions left over).How do we pay for this?
How do we pay for this?
That's not actually true. Where did the money for the defense budget come from? Or the tax cut? Congress signed a bill and the money gets paid. (It does however increase the deficit to spend more than what's being taken in in taxes.)Well then the place to start is to get some of that money out of the military and straighten out the tax code BEFORE we start spending more money that isn't currently being funded. It's pretty naive to simply say the defense budget increased X dollars so we can also spend Y dollars on higher education. It don't work that way. If you want to spend those dollars on something else then ya gotta figure out how to quit spending them on the other.
I little bit of a tangent - but is it really insane for a teacher to earn $80K?
It's pretty naive to simply say the defense budget increased X dollars so we can also spend Y dollars on higher education. It don't work that way.
There are teachers making north of $80000 in Nebraska right now.
Granted, they will most likely be eligible to retire soon and sponsor/coach multiple teams or clubs, and have a Master's Degree and at least the equivalent hours of a second Masters...