Making College Free Could Add a Million New Black and Latino Graduates

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:



Making College Free Could Add a Million New Black and Latino Graduates
Mark Paul, Alan Aja, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity, Jr. ▪ March 21, 2016




In the march toward the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, the role of the voting “millennial” has already proved critical. Earlier this month, The Nation reported on the group’s potential influence in particular primaries, and so far, from Colorado to Michigan, the now largest generation in the country hasn’t disappointed. Political scientist Corey Robin recently weighed in on this “millennial effect,” arguing that it isn’t an unrealistic, “naïve idealism” that has driven many young people to vote for Senator Bernie Sanders, but rather a rational response to the economic inequality and disenfranchisement many millennials face. Among the issues most pertinent to young people, and perhaps driving them to the polls, are the increasing cuts, costs, and debt associated with higher education.

Millennials have shown great interest in Sanders’s platform, fueling his surprisingly strong challenge to what was almost unanimously pronounced “Hillary’s turn.” The vision of government Sanders espouses under the banner of “democratic socialism”—one with free public higher education, strict banking regulation, living wage statutes (for the employed, at least), single-payer health care, campaign finance reform, and other social policies—offers a resounding egalitarian alternative to an increasingly unequal, supposedly “meritocratic” United States. Sanders’s proposed policies would promote the kinds of structural support created under the New Deal and by the postwar policies that fostered the American middle class. Only this time, the policies and their implementation will be inclusive of all racial and gender groups—groups those earlier policies deliberately wrote out.

One notable debate between Sanders and rival Hillary Clinton has been over higher education. Clinton’s current plan preserves a means-tested, competitive, accountability-based approach, complemented by a No Child Left Behind–style expansion of higher education. Her New College Compact uses the conventional rhetoric of improving education by awarding grants to qualifying institutions that meet federal criteria. Her plan does include welcome features such as an increase in Pell Grants to low-income Americans and proposed regulation of predatory loan companies. Yet, to ensure there are no “free lunches,” as South Carolina Congressman and Clinton supporter James Clyburn put it, the plan also requires that students “do their part by contributing their earnings from working 10 hours a week.” And consistent with this supposedly meritocratic frame, Clinton’s policy provides no mechanism to ensure students can find an adequate job, nor one on campus.

Sanders is unabashedly critical of this neoliberal approach, rejecting “performance-based” criteria for education. His plan is not based in market-based solutions for higher education; instead, it proposes a universal strategy to anchor education as a right rather than a privilege. His College for All Act, introduced to Congress in May, would rid public higher education of tuition and fees at once, while significantly reducing student debt burdens. Unlike Clinton’s plan, which includes a tuition-free model for two-year community colleges, Sanders’s plan would eliminate tuition and fees at all public colleges and universities. While both candidates claim they will cut interest rates on student debt, only Sanders provides the details: cutting interest rates on student loans almost in half, allowing new borrowers to save tremendous sums on extracurricular costs (housing, food, books) or on tuition should they opt for private colleges, and allowing previous borrowers to escape usurious rates through refinance options. Free public higher education, coupled with Sanders’s proposed cut in interest rates, would stop the federal government from raking in billions of dollars in revenue from student loans at these colleges. ...........(more)

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/bernie-sanders-free-college-plan-black-latino-graduates

[jwirr]

1. In the 60s when I went to college via LBJ's war on poverty

it was understood that it was all about building the economy and providing educated workers to our businesses. But it also made it clear that many of those graduates would create new businesses and products.

Today we act as if there is no economic value to a graduate other than the degree. Getting students into college and keeping them there is going to help our economic situation more than anything else we can do.

[Nac Mac Feegle]

2. OH NOES!!!!!

We can't have this!!!

Those BROWN 'people" might just prove to be as smart or smarter than us real humans, the white folk.



Is the tag really necessary?



Sometimes, I just want to go out onto a major intersection, grab people out of their cars with Bush/Cheney, Romney, Cruz, or Trump bumper stickers, and pound on them until _I_ feel better.

Then I realize it's just the damn steroids, and I need to go someplace quiet. The side effect you have to put up with, just to stay alive.

[oberliner]

3. Or it could drive HBCU's out of business

“You’ve got to think about the consequences of things,” Clyburn said. “If you start handing out two years of free college at public institutions are you ready for all the black, private HBCUs to close down? That’s what’s going to happen.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/darrensands/clyburn-sanders-education-plan-is-a-disaster-for-private-hbc#.hf3K6AdqM

[ronnie624]

4. An educated population should top the priority list right now,

not a concern for profits. Capitalism creates impediments to education, and that is one of the last things our civilization needs right now. Access to education should be considered a right, and should be paid for with public resources. A society that doesn't educate its population, is acting illogically and unjustly.

[oberliner]

5. The quality of that education is equally important

Just getting a degree is not as important as making sure that the education received is a good one.

[ronnie624]

6. The assumption that education is possible only through capitalism, is a glaring fallacy.n/t

[oberliner]

8. I am not making that assumption

I am just saying that both goals are important.

If there is a way to achieve them both, then that would be idea.

If there is only a way to achieve one and not the other, than the importance of each must be considered carefully.

[LanternWaste]

7. Denying the antecedent

It does not necessarily follow. Again.

Denying the antecedent. The conclusion could be either true or false, but the argument is fallacious because there is a disconnection between the premise and the conclusion.

[oberliner]

9. I am just encouraging people to consider both goals

It seems that sometimes people look only at the admirable goal of getting everyone educated without paying as much consideration to the equally (or even more) important goal of ensuring that education is a quality one.

The latter is not something one hears a lot about on the campaign trail, for instance.

[ronnie624]

13. The ever-present, false, unspoken assumption in your post,

is that the profit motive, by default, equals quality. We've been programmed since birth, through exposure to ideological propaganda, to believe in such fallacies.

[oberliner]

14. I make so such assumption

I certainly do not believe that to be the case.

I do, however, believe that the public school system (K-12) in the United States has some serious problems.

[Igel]

10. K-12 is essentially free.

And yet,

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp

19% of students in 2011-12 didn't graduate on time.

Note that many states have ways of masking the truth. So in Texas, if a drop-out is officially listed as "home schooled" that's not a student in schools that could be listed as graduating or not graduating.

Other states have other ways of gaming the system to avoid having "failing schools".


The numbers aren't so bad for college, but we have a huge drop-out rate. We like to think that it's because of $, because some people think all problems are reducible to $. But a lot of students just fail. Piss-poor study skills, lack of interest, distractions, etc., etc.

[ronnie624]

12. Yep, a shitty school system with fucked-up priorities.

Few things illustrate better, the human penchant for irrational collective behavior.

Figuring out a way to educate people in the basics of science, math and critical thinking is still a priority, if we expect to mitigate the looming threats to our civilization, in the form of impending climate disasters.

[Jefferson23]

11. That's what your candidate Clinton would like voters to believe, but it was debunked and you had no

idea?

Before drafting this essay, I also had an opportunity to speak with Tezlyn Figaro, National African-American Outreach, Director of Racial Justice for the Sanders’ campaign. Ms. Figaro, responding to charges that Sanders lacks a cogent plan for HBCUs, stated that “due to declining federal Government financial support for HBCUs and because 51% of HBCU’s are public colleges, Senator Sanders’ plan will allow more students to attend the HBCU of their choice which will in turn increase HBCU enrollment.”
http://www.langleyharper.com/bernie-sanders-is-better-for-black-colleges/

Additionally:
http://hbcubuzz.com/2016/02/44904/