Thanks to the wise and worldly reader who responded to the piece on compensation absurdities by noting how many institutions offer lower pay rates for student workers than for hourly workers doing the same thing.
If we don’t value our students’ labor, why should we expect anyone else to?
Kudos to Sophie McGuinness for her study, recently published in Education Finance and Policy, entitled “Can Public Investment in Community Colleges Draw Adult Learners Away From For-Profits?”
The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes.
A robust public option puts pressure on for-profit providers to do a better job. Those who can’t won’t survive. When public options are starved of resources, they are forced to behave more like for-profits, thereby losing their competitive (and ethical) advantage.
Education doesn’t fit cleanly into the category of a commodity because it almost never captures the value of what it produces. Realistically, it can’t; much of the market value of improved job skills comes years or decades down the line, and much of the civic value of education doesn’t show up directly in dollar terms. For example, people with more education live longer, divorce less often, vote more regularly and commit fewer crimes than people with less education. There’s a clear economic benefit to the larger society from those changes, but colleges don’t capture that benefit. Accordingly, they tend to be underfunded.
Rather than ceding the educational field to providers whose incentives are perverse, it’s more socially beneficial to provide a solid public option. It costs more up front, but it’s a bargain over time. It’s always nice to have empirical proof.
The Girl is in her final semester of college, so she’s focusing on what comes next. She doesn’t want to go directly to grad school, so she’s applying for jobs.
With a GPA over 3.9 and multiple internships, she has sent out over 150 applications so far and has yet to get an interview.
If you aren’t in one of a relatively few occupational niches, it’s brutal out there. The so-called slow hire, slow fire economy hits new market entrants hard. It isn’t the first time that new grads have faced a tough market, but for a time that isn’t yet an official recession, this is particularly bad.
I don’t usually do sports stories, but this one is worth it.
Community colleges are famously devoted to second chances.
This story in our local paper offers a different angle, focusing on a former star athlete who came back for his second year of athletic eligibility at age 32. And it has a hell of a photo.
When I saw the team play earlier in the season, I thought he looked older than the rest of the team.
For me, the key quote was “Diving for loose balls … well, that doesn’t always happen,” he said. “My knees.”
Relatable.
