Ron Johnson: Students Graduating Late because "College is Fun"
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  Ron Johnson: Students Graduating Late because "College is Fun"
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Author Topic: Ron Johnson: Students Graduating Late because "College is Fun"  (Read 2074 times)
publicunofficial
angryGreatness
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« on: April 22, 2015, 12:52:53 PM »

If he wasn't in danger before:

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« Reply #1 on: April 22, 2015, 01:43:03 PM »

Johnson is playing a risky game, but I can see his plan. He has very little interest in attracting crossover votes - I doubt we'll see many Clinton-Johnson ballots - but will throw himself completely with the GOP ticket with red meat for the base, and hopes that he can be dragged by Walker (or whoever'is coattails)

Is that study true? Does it really take five to six years to complete a four year degree?
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Miles
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« Reply #2 on: April 22, 2015, 01:51:56 PM »

I mean, it was fun for me in college having all that extra time to make maps!
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Xing
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« Reply #3 on: April 22, 2015, 02:43:04 PM »

What is it with Wisconsin Republicans being completely clueless about college? Not exactly the best strategy for winning younger voters over.
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dmmidmi
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« Reply #4 on: April 23, 2015, 01:37:36 PM »

He's right. College is a lot of fun.
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King
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« Reply #5 on: April 23, 2015, 01:53:16 PM »

He's right. College is a lot of fun.

College is fun, but final year of college is the opposite of fun.
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« Reply #6 on: April 23, 2015, 04:04:49 PM »

Johnson is playing a risky game, but I can see his plan. He has very little interest in attracting crossover votes - I doubt we'll see many Clinton-Johnson ballots - but will throw himself completely with the GOP ticket with red meat for the base, and hopes that he can be dragged by Walker (or whoever'is coattails)

Is that study true? Does it really take five to six years to complete a four year degree?

Yeah, I think it is.  Part of it is people aren't taking a full course load but are working instead.  Another is that some degrees have cumbersome requirements and so it's hard to get into and schedule the classes you need to complete them.  Other reasons too, college being fun just one of them.
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Mr. Illini
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« Reply #7 on: April 23, 2015, 04:09:18 PM »

Ron Johnson is an idiot
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pbrower2a
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« Reply #8 on: April 24, 2015, 05:41:43 AM »

College is certainly fun in contrast to doing the sort of job that one typically gets out of high school (retail clerking, restaurant work, farm labor, cleaning, construction labor)...

If one needs to work full time to avoid ending up with a debt as heavy as that for a sports car, then one cannot reasonably expect to complete to complete college in four years. Some part-time and summer work won't hurt, and might help one avoid some guilty feelings... but the part time work had better be slight.

The GOP simply wants cheap, scared labor.
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sg0508
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« Reply #9 on: April 24, 2015, 09:53:02 AM »

Well, Republicans have to attract the Gen Y voters in someway and being one of them, there is VERY little the GOP has to offer to us.  True, a lot of our generation simply sucks, but going law/order on us (as a whole) and keeping up the anti-gay rhetoric isn't going to fly. 

So, why not give it a shot?
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angus
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« Reply #10 on: April 24, 2015, 11:44:21 AM »

Does it really take five to six years to complete a four year degree?

Not really.  Nevertheless, many take longer than four years.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 40% of students graduate within four years and about 60% of students graduate within six years.  The distribution isn't a Gaussian function.  It is more common for students to take four years to graduate than it is for them to take six years.  Yet the average duration is about six years.

Also, I don't think anything that Johnson said was bizarre or inaccurate.  From the point of view of a student, being in school is attractive compared to being finished and being pressured to seek gainful employment.  I know I certainly felt that way as a student.  I avoided the problem by going to graduate school, but extending one's undergraduate career is another option. 

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bore
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« Reply #11 on: April 24, 2015, 12:54:30 PM »

Jim Murphy spent 9 years at Strathclyde and still didn't get a degree.

(I know it's not especially relevant, but I enjoy this fact)
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angus
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« Reply #12 on: April 24, 2015, 02:53:11 PM »

Jim Murphy spent 9 years at Strathclyde and still didn't get a degree.

(I know it's not especially relevant, but I enjoy this fact)

I've read some conflicting data about this sort of thing, but here's a datum from a fairly reliable source:  Apparently 29% of students who start a four-year university degree don't finish (or don't finish within ten years of a study) according to the US Department of Education. 

If we add that 29% to the 59% or so mentioned above, that means that 88 percent are either finishing within six years or not finishing at all, therefore 12 percent require more than six years.  Murphy might be part of the 29% who don't finish, or, if he eventually finishes, he'll be among the 12 percent who eventually finished but took longer than six years.
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angus
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« Reply #13 on: April 24, 2015, 06:03:06 PM »

Regardless, Johnson's point about student loans is a compelling one that deserves more attention.

Johnson's point, indeed.  Ron Paul has been making that point for at least eleven years.  I've spoken with him personally about this on two occasions.  There are very few sectors of the economy in which the costs have risen faster than medical services.  Higher education is one of them.  Universities have every incentive to keep raising tuition as long as they know that the students that they're trying to recruit can come by the money easily and cheaply simply by asking the federal government for it.  Meanwhile, high school guidance councilors are advising any student who scores higher than a D in high school chemistry to attend a university and major in mathematics, science, or, if they are really into it, engineering, and you have the perfect recipe for a bloated system.  Combine that with a state legislature which year after year decreases state funding to the public university system, or keeps it flat, and you have a perfectly unsustainable situation.  Easy money from Uncle Sam keeps universities recruiting even from the bottom of the barrel, dwindling funds from the state keeps tuitions rising, cash-strapped, lower-class families faithful to the future economic opportunities keep borrowing low-interest money, grade inflation keeps just enough of them passing from year to year to keep administrators happy, and voila:  a generation of college graduates neither prepared to meet the challenges of a global economy and a state university system so dependent on expansion and recruitment of any and all prospective students that six-year plans becomes the norm.  After all, who wants to look for a job when you have talked to scores of people who have graduated and can't find any (either because they lack the skills or because the jobs they had imagined when their guidance councilors talked them into going to university don't exist), and who wants the students to graduate in four years when you can milk the federal government out of six years worth of tuition payments?  Let's make it seven.  Or eight.  After all, if you can sell a box of widgets, then you should try to sell a hundred boxes, or a thousand.  It's the American way.
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« Reply #14 on: April 25, 2015, 03:42:48 AM »

Wouldn't the easiest thing to do would be to cap fees? Here they are capped at £9,000 a year. (Still a ridiculous price that hopefully will be reduced next parliament, but still)
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pbrower2a
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« Reply #15 on: April 25, 2015, 10:49:13 AM »

They are graduating late in part because they are stressed financially.

During the Bush II disaster, the federal government heavily pushed for-profit education, often from overpriced but substandard schools that offer a little bit of specialized training but little real education. The Obama Administration has been shutting down some of those schools or putting pressure on those that remain to get better results -- but that takes time. Those schools get execrable results.

Students focused on the cost of education are more focused on activities that get them hired quickly even if those activities allow practically no professional growth.

The cost of college education needs to be addressed. College education used to be heavily subsidized, so people who might have still ended up with proletarian jobs might become leaders. What is wrong with someone graduating from college, getting or keeping a job in an auto plant, becoming a union steward to find some meaning in his job, and using some of what he learned in college (let us say financial analysis) as an asset in union negotiations? What is wrong with some kid from the Reservation graduating from the University of Arizona, returning to the Reservation, and becoming a tribal leader who better knows how to deal with non-Indians because of having had more exposure to them for about four years in an unthreatening environment?

Someone who gets a good education and returns to a blue-collar world is not a tragedy. Someone who gets a second-rate education and an impaired life but has a huge student loan to pay off is a tragedy. 

     
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angus
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« Reply #16 on: April 25, 2015, 11:55:21 AM »

Wouldn't the easiest thing to do would be to cap fees? Here they are capped at £9,000 a year. (Still a ridiculous price that hopefully will be reduced next parliament, but still)

The governor has proposed an 11% increase in funding for state universities in exchange for a tuition freeze.  Some universities would take it because they're better off with the state's funds, especially those small ones in rural areas.  Others have performed market analyses and feel that they're better off increasing tuition and declining the funding, especially those in larger markets.  

Of course this is just a governor's proposed budget.  His party is in the minority in both chambers of the state legislature so he'd probably have to agree to a bunch of other stuff that might not taste good to him in order to get that concession.

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NewYorkExpress
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« Reply #17 on: April 25, 2015, 12:00:26 PM »

That depends on what you went to college to do.

If you went to college to get a degree, and network towards a job, like one is supposed to, then it's not necessarily fun...but it's far more worthwhile to those who do it.

But if you're in college for athletics or to party (I've met people like that), it's fun, but you're getting nothing (except maybe a stint in say... the NBA) out of it, and that might be closer to what Johnson is talking about (although these students often don't graduate at all).

Still, he and GOP colleagues need to start offering solutions instead of insulting people.
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Sprouts Farmers Market ✘
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« Reply #18 on: April 25, 2015, 01:00:27 PM »

If you went to college to get a degree, and network towards a job, like one is supposed to, then it's not necessarily fun...but it's far more worthwhile to those who do it.

But if you're in college for athletics or to party (I've met people like that), it's fun, but you're getting nothing (except maybe a stint in say... the NBA) out of it, and that might be closer to what Johnson is talking about (although these students often don't graduate at all).


I find it funny that these are not mutually exclusive sadly. The ones who get good jobs seem to be the ones incapable of stringing a coherent sentence together from my experience. Of course, there are a few exceptions where intelligent narcissists tend to prevail instead, but the vast majority of those who get the best jobs seem to have a GPA around 3.0 if that and are athletes.

Maybe I'm being cynical to a degree, but that's the way it always seems to play out.
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