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The real cost of low wages
Asura.Saevel
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By Asura.Saevel 2015-04-24 20:39:04
Quote: But if I attend a state school (as I eventually did), why should I leave with thousands of dollars of debt?
Because education is expensive and expecting me to pay for your liberal arts degree, or for you to "discover yourself" is stupid. You can only push so much entitlement onto the diminishing tax base before they break and the whole system crumbles.
You will never "tax the rich", won't happen because those with extremely high amounts of wealth can afford to high very good accountants and lawyers who devise very creative ways to lower their tax obligations. Every time you try to "tax the rich more!" they just evade and that obligation falls to those with enough income to qualify but not enough to higher good accountants and lawyers, which is the upper middle class. Why do you think tax's are always based on income and not wealth? Wealthy people have low incomes relative to their wealth while middle class have the exact opposite. Taxing based on income guarantees wealthy can always pay less relative to their total wealth then anyone else, and you idiots who don't understand money think the number on your paycheck is your "wealth". I feel sorry for you because you'll never acquire any real amount of power or wealth.
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By Shiva.Onorgul 2015-04-25 00:27:25
Reduced tuition rates make sense, but how can you force that? Cancel college football.
I attended and live beside one of the universities in the country whose football program actually pays for itself. Most operate in the red and use students' fees to cover the shortfall (and the few who do turn a profit do just like government agencies in that they spend every cent they have on stuff they don't need to justify their budgets). And there's the deep and abiding problems with the NCAA and how it exploits the hell out of people who are ostensibly getting an education but who literally cannot because sports practice (whether football, basketball, or whatever) is a legitimate full-time job. Indeed, on top of not being able to study, quite a lot of "student athletes" have trouble feeding themselves because they have no time for a part-time job, either.
Oh, and let's not forget that the highest-paid state employee in most states is a college football or basketball coach, often pulling down literal millions. They're government employees and making multiple times more money than the President of the United States. Kinda *** insane, especially when you consider most state university students are getting a ton of money through grants and federal loans, i.e., we're paying these coaches with our taxes.
sometimes for degrees that are practically useless I see that phrase a lot. It tends to get mindlessly attached to liberal arts degrees or, worse still, fine arts degrees. The data doesn't back up the claim, though. As I said, most people aren't using their degree in a very direct way. It's one of the benefits of an arts degree: because the coursework at the bachelor level is spread over a broad array of skills with a fairly fuzzy focus, you produce people who can adapt to working 20 different jobs in their life, which is the current normal. Take someone like Kingnobody who (allegedly) has a pile of math degrees and they're stuck in a narrow window of options whether they like it or not (in fairness, he claims to have a bunch of business degrees, too, so he'd be less pigeon-holed).
There's only one university that I know of that offers a degree for underwater basket weaving. That and "communications," whatever the *** that's supposed to mean, are the only ones I'd seriously call useless. Seriously, can anyone tell me what a communications degree is supposed to accomplish? It sounds like the HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE, inbred child of a business administration degree and an English degree.
Abolishing out-of-state tuition rates is a decent first step in theory I'm genuinely curious why this was the thought that occurred to you. I actually know very few people who attend state universities out-of-state. The overwhelming majority who do are generally because they're on a sports scholarship and I think I've made very clear my disdain of the college sports system that we have now.
I have a feeling there's a personal anecdote here. I'd be interested to hear it.
Anyhow, I know no one likes to hear, "Let the state cover it." But we already are. They're state universities, they get the majority of their funding through taxes and students' fees which are, themselves, generated by taxes. It's a revolving door of money that inexplicably leaves a 22-year-old holding the bag. Seems like a serious *** move. If we've already decided to allocate funds in the form of grants and loans, skip the middleman, tighten up academic requirements (people who skate by on constant academic probation are dragging themselves and everyone else down -- there's a reason Obama's community college program is tied to performance), and reduce the cost to little-to-nothing.
It's not like attending college is cost-free, anyways, even with tuition covered. I had a full-ride tuition to a private university and still had to cover room, board, food, and all the miscellaneous expenses like activity fees and a cell phone bill and the like. Someone should be able to work 15-20 hours at a McDonald's to cover those incidentals. That's nominally what minimum wage is for, right? It's surely what keeps getting argued around here.
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By Shiva.Onorgul 2015-04-25 00:30:01
You will never "tax the rich", won't happen because those with extremely high amounts of wealth can afford to high very good accountants and lawyers who devise very creative ways to lower their tax obligations. Every time you try to "tax the rich more!" they just evade and that obligation falls to those with enough income to qualify but not enough to higher good accountants and lawyers, which is the upper middle class. Why do you think tax's are always based on income and not wealth? Wealthy people have low incomes relative to their wealth while middle class have the exact opposite. Taxing based on income guarantees wealthy can always pay less relative to their total wealth then anyone else, and you idiots who don't understand money think the number on your paycheck is your "wealth". Goodness, don't repeat any of this around Kingnobody. He doesn't think tax fraud or creative accounting exist.
I feel sorry for you because you'll never acquire any real amount of power or wealth. Ha ha ha ha ha. What a sad life you lead.
Oh yeah...
Because education is expensive and expecting me to pay for your liberal arts degree, or for you to "discover yourself" is stupid. You can only push so much entitlement onto the diminishing tax base before they break and the whole system crumbles. Outfitting our citizens to be productive is not "entitlement." Nor is keeping them healthy. This cognitive failure amazes me, but it consistently comes from people who've never actually seen poverty up close.
But since you missed the point I made in the first place, I'll restate it: what good does it do anyone to expect people to be educated and productive while denying them the necessary education? I don't even want to delve into how shitty the American public school system is and why its selling all of us downriver, but since the parrot response to anyone saying they're poor is "Well, go get a STEM degree, but pay for it out of your own pocket, ***," you're basically trying to have your cake and eat it, too.
By EpicFantasy 2015-04-25 01:42:29
Oh, and let's not forget that the highest-paid state employee in most states is a college football or basketball coach, often pulling down literal millions. They're government employees and making multiple times more money than the President of the United States. Kinda *** insane, especially when you consider most state university students are getting a ton of money through grants and federal loans, i.e., we're paying these coaches with our taxes.
Seriously.
Coaches are paid from athletic department revenue, such as ticket sales and television rights not taxpayer funds. Sure they get paid way to damn much, that is a different debate. Please stop lying.
Outfitting our citizens to be productive is not "entitlement." Nor is keeping them healthy. This cognitive failure amazes me, but it consistently comes from people who've never actually seen poverty up close. You want to give people something for nothing at the expense of others. Others that more than likely work for what you want to take away and give to people for free. Not only is that "entitlement" what exactly gives you "government" the right?
But since you missed the point I made in the first place,
You don't make points you continually contradict yourself while demanding the government pay for you. Can add lying and/or ignorance to the list since you stated the above. Most likely both.
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By fonewear 2015-04-25 08:55:59
No STEM degree we need more Dance majors !
Six out of ten white people can't dance...that is a serious problem.
Don't worry I heard Hillary is going to offer free 4 year degrees if you vote for her !
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By Asura.Kingnobody 2015-04-25 09:00:06
Reduced tuition rates make sense, but how can you force that? An ACA type bill which attempts to decrease rates but in reality nearly double them in the year of inception.
Yeah, that makes since. Lets get rid of a major revenue raiser for the state or private university, that will certainly decrease tuition fees and costs.
Which, I'm not surprised you came up with that. You have no business sense, so you don't know how to lower costs or anything.
By fonewear 2015-04-25 09:01:36
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
Since visual aids trump reading: click to zoom
A lot of words... The takeaway? At least in the United States, you don’t need a STEM degree to get a STEM job, and if you do get a degree, you won’t necessarily work in that field after you graduate. If there is in fact a STEM worker shortage, wouldn’t you expect more people with STEM degrees to be filling those jobs? And if many STEM jobs can be filled by people who don’t have STEM degrees, then why the big push to get more students to pursue STEM?
Now consider the projections that suggest a STEM worker shortfall. One of the most cited in recent U.S. debates comes from the 2011 Georgetown University report mentioned above, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton of the Center on Education and the Workforce. It estimated there will be slightly more than 2.4 million STEM job openings in the United States between 2008 and 2018, with 1.1 million newly created jobs and the rest to replace workers who retire or move to non-STEM fields; they conclude that there will be roughly 277 000 STEM vacancies per year.
But the Georgetown study did not fully account for the Great Recession. It projected a downturn in 2009 but then a steady increase in jobs beginning in 2010 and a return to normal by the year 2018. In fact, though, more than 370 000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I don’t mean to single out this study for criticism; it just illustrates the difficulty of accurately predicting STEM demand and supply even a year or two out, let alone over a prolonged period. Highly competitive science- and technology-driven industries are volatile, where radical restructurings and boom-and-bust cycles have been the norm for decades. Many STEM jobs today are also targets for outsourcing or replacement by automation.
The nature of STEM work has also changed dramatically in the past several decades. In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past, employers seldom offer generous education and training benefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete.
Any of these factors can affect both short-term and longer-term demand for STEM workers, as well as for the particular skills those workers will need. The agencies that track science and engineering employment know this to be true. Buried in Chapter 3 of a 2012 NSF workforce study, for instance, you’ll find this caveat: “Projections of employment growth are plagued by uncertain assumptions and are notoriously difficult to make.”
So is there a shortfall of STEM workers or isn’t there?
The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field.
Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master’s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there’s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades.
Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.
Spot shortages for certain STEM specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked demand for data scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in can’t assume such shortages will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline.
What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there was no evidence “that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.”
That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”
Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.”
“None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”
So why the persistent anxiety that a STEM crisis exists? Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.” In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57 000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India.
You’ll hear similar arguments made elsewhere. In India, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Vijay Kumar Saraswat, recently noted that in his country, “a meagre four persons out of every 1000 are choosing S&T or research, as compared to 110 in Japan, 76 in Germany and Israel, 55 in USA, 46 in Korea and 8 in China.” Leaders in South Africa and Brazil cite similar statistics to show how they are likewise falling behind in the STEM race.
“The government responds either with money [for research] or, more recently, with visas to increase the number of STEM workers,” Teitelbaum says. “This continues for a number of years until the claims of a shortage turn out not to be true and a bust ensues.” Students who graduate during the bust, he says, are shocked to discover that “they can’t find jobs, or they find jobs but not stable ones.”
At the moment, we’re in the alarm-heading-toward-boom part of the cycle. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government spends more than US $3 billion each year on 209 STEM-related initiatives overseen by 13 federal agencies. That’s about $100 for every U.S. student beyond primary school. In addition, major corporations are collectively spending millions to support STEM educational programs. And every U.S. state, along with a host of public and private universities, high schools, middle schools, and even primary schools, has its own STEM initiatives. The result is that many people’s fortunes are now tied to the STEM crisis, real or manufactured.
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By Asura.Kingnobody 2015-04-25 10:25:12
You will never "tax the rich", won't happen because those with extremely high amounts of wealth can afford to high very good accountants and lawyers who devise very creative ways to lower their tax obligations. Every time you try to "tax the rich more!" they just evade and that obligation falls to those with enough income to qualify but not enough to higher good accountants and lawyers, which is the upper middle class. Name some of these "creative ways to lower their tax obligations."
I dare you. I mean, if there were "creative ways" to do those things, I'm sure you know what they are. People keep saying that, but they never say what they are.
Why do you think tax's are always based on income and not wealth? Because the concept of double taxation. You do realize that wealth is money already taxed before, right?
Taxing based on income guarantees wealthy can always pay less relative to their total wealth then anyone else, and you idiots who don't understand money think the number on your paycheck is your "wealth". I feel sorry for you because you'll never acquire any real amount of power or wealth. So, what do you suggest? The French taxation approach of taxing the wealthy based by their wealth, with a tax that can exceed 100% of their total wealth?
Think that's fair?
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By Asura.Kingnobody 2015-04-25 10:30:37
what good does it do anyone to expect people to be educated and productive while denying them the necessary education? What good is providing a service to people who are not expected to use it?
Yeah, let's make all secondary education free, and see how that will get us. Answer: pretty much exactly where we are now, just a lot more dropouts because classes are "too hard" and instead of bachelor degrees being the required degree for professional level jobs, masters now become the required degree, with a new level above doctorate being the "top" degree.
So, basically, you did absolutely nothing to solve the problem at hand.
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Bahamut.Ravael
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By Bahamut.Ravael 2015-04-25 10:30:57
Reduced tuition rates make sense, but how can you force that? Cancel college football. Where I went to college, the football team most definitely operated in the black. It was a money-maker for the school, and the only other sports team that made any money was the men's basketball team. Every other team operated in the red. Cancelling college football across the board would harm any such school and could kill off their other sports programs because they could no longer afford them.
Abolishing out-of-state tuition rates is a decent first step in theory I'm genuinely curious why this was the thought that occurred to you. I actually know very few people who attend state universities out-of-state. The overwhelming majority who do are generally because they're on a sports scholarship and I think I've made very clear my disdain of the college sports system that we have now.
I have a feeling there's a personal anecdote here. I'd be interested to hear it. So, you're accusing me of a personal anecdote by supplying a personal anecdote?
Oh look, statistics.
While a lot of colleges do have a relatively low out-of-state percentage of students, there are quite a few schools where they make up quite a large chunk of the student body, sometimes over half.
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By Asura.Kingnobody 2015-04-25 10:36:05
Are you going to ignore that little jab he made about you being racist Ravael?
I know you aren't, hell, I'm not, but we seem to be called that a lot around here, huh?
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Bahamut.Ravael
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By Bahamut.Ravael 2015-04-25 10:48:07
Are you going to ignore that little jab he made about you being racist Ravael?
I know you aren't, hell, I'm not, but we seem to be called that a lot around here, huh?
You're saying that disagreeing with a black man's political views doesn't make you a racist? The definition of racism has changed so much over the last 6 years that I can't even tell anymore.
Garuda.Chanti
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By Garuda.Chanti 2015-04-25 12:46:02
You will never "tax the rich", won't happen because those with extremely high amounts of wealth can afford to high very good accountants and lawyers who devise very creative ways to lower their tax obligations. Every time you try to "tax the rich more!" they just evade and that obligation falls to those with enough income to qualify but not enough to higher good accountants and lawyers, which is the upper middle class. Name some of these "creative ways to lower their tax obligations."
I dare you. I mean, if there were "creative ways" to do those things, I'm sure you know what they are. People keep saying that, but they never say what they are. He means it Saevel, remember its his job to know and apply the tax code to the advantage of his clients.
But please understand this King, to a lot of laymen what you consider a part of the tax code is somewhere between "creative" and voodoo.
By fonewear 2015-04-25 13:03:40
Are you going to ignore that little jab he made about you being racist Ravael?
I know you aren't, hell, I'm not, but we seem to be called that a lot around here, huh?
You're saying that disagreeing with a black man's political views doesn't make you a racist? The definition of racism has changed so much over the last 6 years that I can't even tell anymore.
As a white man that pretends to be black I find this offensive !
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By Asura.Kingnobody 2015-04-25 13:25:46
You will never "tax the rich", won't happen because those with extremely high amounts of wealth can afford to high very good accountants and lawyers who devise very creative ways to lower their tax obligations. Every time you try to "tax the rich more!" they just evade and that obligation falls to those with enough income to qualify but not enough to higher good accountants and lawyers, which is the upper middle class. Name some of these "creative ways to lower their tax obligations."
I dare you. I mean, if there were "creative ways" to do those things, I'm sure you know what they are. People keep saying that, but they never say what they are. He means it Saevel, remember its his job to know and apply the tax code to the advantage of his clients.
But please understand this King, to a lot of laymen what you consider a part of the tax code is somewhere between "creative" and voodoo. To everyone. Not just to my clients.
The code may be complicated to those who cannot read it, but it really isn't that difficult when you understand the concepts and theories behind what the IRS and Congress does.
I have given advice to people, both regular posters, VIPs, moderators, and even Scragg once, about taxes. And I didn't charge one cent to anyone who asks.
But it really bugs me where people think that only the wealthy has access to these laws and regulations. That isn't true, everyone does, and if you ask, I'm sure that some CPAs will give free advice to those they trust.
Acting on that advice is a different matter. I can tell you to use Revenue Procedure 84-16 in a response, but doing it, and doing it right, that's going to cost a little money. However, just by telling you about that Rev. Proc., I have done about 75% of the work for you.
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By fonewear 2015-04-25 13:35:37
I'll give you all some free advice... it is quite expensive though !
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By Shiva.Onorgul 2015-04-25 13:55:32
So, you're accusing me of a personal anecdote by supplying a personal anecdote? I wasn't accusing you of anything, I was genuinely interested.
I don't know if it's the function of the forum or the fact that you guys are deliberately partisan, but the automatic defensive posture, complete with hackles raised, is tiresome.
Lets get rid of a major revenue raiser for the state or private university, that will certainly decrease tuition fees and costs. Factually untrue. And although I said "football," since that's the local religion, I'll extend it to all college sports. Most universities operate deeply in the red on their sports programs.
And, again, I have other objections to the way college sports are operated.
what good does it do anyone to expect people to be educated and productive while denying them the necessary education? What good is providing a service to people who are not expected to use it?
Yeah, let's make all secondary education free, and see how that will get us. Answer: pretty much exactly where we are now, just a lot more dropouts because classes are "too hard" and instead of bachelor degrees being the required degree for professional level jobs, masters now become the required degree, with a new level above doctorate being the "top" degree.
So, basically, you did absolutely nothing to solve the problem at hand. Amazing, you managed to land squarely on a point I've been covertly making without even realizing it.
You lot keep saying that if someone doesn't like how little money they're making, they should go get a degree. I pointed out exactly the treadmill involved (and a lot of other related problems) and only now do you get it. Except you probably don't.
This is ostensibly a thread about the minimum wage. How do you propose that people get above the minimum wage? By telling them to go back to school. But if everyone goes to school, everyone gets deeper in debt because our university system is *** up, and no one manages to advance. So why do you keep telling people to get a degree? Hell, I owe fonewear a debt of thanks for echoing my point that STEM degrees are not the instant key to success and prosperity that you guys keep repeating.
My point always has been that if you think everyone needs a better education just to keep a roof over their head, much less to live in a reasonable manner, the only sensible answer is to make that education as freely available as possible. If you want to argue that turning college into high school 2.0 (which is very much what has been done to it in our lifetime) and putting entire generations of new workers into crippling debt is insane, especially when the process of doing so does little or nothing to improve their earning potential, then propose a more sensible solution.
I want college to be an ivory tower where only academics go. I many times thought about quitting before getting my degree because the classes were so insulting. I had to take a few years off to care for my parents, so in the ~8 years between graduating high school, starting university, and returning to university, I was shocked to find that the things being taught in 2008 were things I'd learned in 1998 (I'm talking about skills and methodology, not facts and concepts).
If you want my real solution, it's to fix our primary education system. We used to be top of the world, now we're a long, long, long way from it. Focus on standardized testing instead of the ability to learn is at the core, but so are things like funding and the school district version of gerrymandering. And, since you pointed it out with your reports from the Cato Institute, the starting salary of teachers in many states is less than what one could potentially collect in welfare, in spite of the fact that teachers require almost as much secondary education as physicians and lawyers.
I think education is the answer, I don't think college is. If people collected a properly varied skillset in primary education and refined it either in their last two years of high school or in two years at a community college, that would probably do what's needed to make the average 18-to-20-year-old ready to step into the world of work.
A secondary concern would be combating the causes and problems of poverty. Teenage pregnancy, for instance, is a really good way to ensure that a woman never gets a full education and that a man is stuck with a crippling financial burden. Being too poor to keep a roof over the family's head and food in their bellies is what often drives people to quit school and either pursue minimum wage slavery or, worse still, criminality.
I know you guys like to say, "You shouldn't get something for nothing." Well, everyone gets something for nothing, first off; we're not living anywhere near a mercenary Objectivist utopia where every gulp of air is carefully metered and paid for. Secondly, though, if we want to have a world worth living in, that means investing in achieving that goal. For instance, I'm a cyclist. I don't touch the interstate highway system ever (it's illegal and super dangerous and why would I want to?). I don't grouse about my taxes maintaining those highways, though, because they facilitate the movement of goods that keep me comfortable and employed, to say nothing of providing a means by which to travel at a more rapid pace when I visit family out-of-town.
If you want fewer people to be living in crippling poverty and relying on governmental assistance for so long that they become institutionalized and unwilling to get off it, if you want to see crime rates continue to decrease and see the subsequent de-militarization of our police, if you want to see our GDP grow and our deficit shrink, you have to invest. There's so much talk lately about infrastructure, and we do desperately need to get off our thumbs and deal with the fact that our highways are growing out-dated and our telecomm networks are obsolete, but there's the soft infrastructure of people to think about, too.
Or we could just bring back slavery, I guess. Or borrow a page from Stalin and start killing any citizen who gives us a *** look. Those will do the job, too. Might even work out for the better since we have population problems as it stands.
Asura.Saevel
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By Asura.Saevel 2015-04-25 14:08:38
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
Since visual aids trump reading: click to zoom
A lot of words... The takeaway? At least in the United States, you don’t need a STEM degree to get a STEM job, and if you do get a degree, you won’t necessarily work in that field after you graduate. If there is in fact a STEM worker shortage, wouldn’t you expect more people with STEM degrees to be filling those jobs? And if many STEM jobs can be filled by people who don’t have STEM degrees, then why the big push to get more students to pursue STEM?
Now consider the projections that suggest a STEM worker shortfall. One of the most cited in recent U.S. debates comes from the 2011 Georgetown University report mentioned above, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton of the Center on Education and the Workforce. It estimated there will be slightly more than 2.4 million STEM job openings in the United States between 2008 and 2018, with 1.1 million newly created jobs and the rest to replace workers who retire or move to non-STEM fields; they conclude that there will be roughly 277 000 STEM vacancies per year.
But the Georgetown study did not fully account for the Great Recession. It projected a downturn in 2009 but then a steady increase in jobs beginning in 2010 and a return to normal by the year 2018. In fact, though, more than 370 000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I don’t mean to single out this study for criticism; it just illustrates the difficulty of accurately predicting STEM demand and supply even a year or two out, let alone over a prolonged period. Highly competitive science- and technology-driven industries are volatile, where radical restructurings and boom-and-bust cycles have been the norm for decades. Many STEM jobs today are also targets for outsourcing or replacement by automation.
The nature of STEM work has also changed dramatically in the past several decades. In engineering, for instance, your job is no longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past, employers seldom offer generous education and training benefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete.
Any of these factors can affect both short-term and longer-term demand for STEM workers, as well as for the particular skills those workers will need. The agencies that track science and engineering employment know this to be true. Buried in Chapter 3 of a 2012 NSF workforce study, for instance, you’ll find this caveat: “Projections of employment growth are plagued by uncertain assumptions and are notoriously difficult to make.”
So is there a shortfall of STEM workers or isn’t there?
The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field.
Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master’s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there’s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades.
Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.
Spot shortages for certain STEM specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked demand for data scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in can’t assume such shortages will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline.
What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there was no evidence “that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.”
That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”
Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.”
“None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”
So why the persistent anxiety that a STEM crisis exists? Michael S. Teitelbaum, a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School and a senior advisor to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has studied the phenomenon, and he says that in the United States the anxiety dates back to World War II. Ever since then it has tended to run in cycles that he calls “alarm, boom, and bust.” He says the cycle usually starts when “someone or some group sounds the alarm that there is a critical crisis of insufficient numbers of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians” and as a result the country “is in jeopardy of either a national security risk or of falling behind economically.” In the 1950s, he notes, Americans worried that the Soviet Union was producing 95 000 scientists and engineers a year while the United States was producing only about 57 000. In the 1980s, it was the perceived Japanese economic juggernaut that was the threat, and now it is China and India.
You’ll hear similar arguments made elsewhere. In India, the director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Vijay Kumar Saraswat, recently noted that in his country, “a meagre four persons out of every 1000 are choosing S&T or research, as compared to 110 in Japan, 76 in Germany and Israel, 55 in USA, 46 in Korea and 8 in China.” Leaders in South Africa and Brazil cite similar statistics to show how they are likewise falling behind in the STEM race.
“The government responds either with money [for research] or, more recently, with visas to increase the number of STEM workers,” Teitelbaum says. “This continues for a number of years until the claims of a shortage turn out not to be true and a bust ensues.” Students who graduate during the bust, he says, are shocked to discover that “they can’t find jobs, or they find jobs but not stable ones.”
At the moment, we’re in the alarm-heading-toward-boom part of the cycle. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government spends more than US $3 billion each year on 209 STEM-related initiatives overseen by 13 federal agencies. That’s about $100 for every U.S. student beyond primary school. In addition, major corporations are collectively spending millions to support STEM educational programs. And every U.S. state, along with a host of public and private universities, high schools, middle schools, and even primary schools, has its own STEM initiatives. The result is that many people’s fortunes are now tied to the STEM crisis, real or manufactured.
The problem is that they are including the IT field and not understanding that it's much different then the rest of STEM. Degree's mean jack sh!t in IT. Practically everything studied at university will be obsolete or non-applicable to the current market. The IT market changes quarterly, with each year being different then the last. And like other professions, the high paying / high demand jobs are in specializations, specializations that aren't taught in university. I couldn't give a rats a$$ what someone learned during their university, I need someone with experience working with VSphere, Dell SANs, converged fabric and I need them right now. We need experienced administrators and engineers who understand MS Exchange 2013 and how to integrate that with non-MS services. Cyber security is a huge field now that has skill sets that no degree can teach, it's mostly pulling from previous Information Security folks who dabbled in white / grey hat hacking.
And when it comes time to hire, promote or offer pay raises, the guys who wait for the company to "teach them" new skill sets will always be behind those who show the initiative and seek that knowledge on their own. IT is about managing your own career, there is no "job for life" happening, the person needs to constantly be on the lookout for a better position or ready to take opertunites when they present themselves instead. I'm constantly dealing with college grads with a Comp Sci degree who were lied to about the value of that degree. Getting one in business with a minor in computer science while simultaneously doing volunteer IT work (during college) for some charity would of been far more useful.
Serveur: Asura
Game: FFXI
Posts: 34187
By Asura.Kingnobody 2015-04-25 14:24:52
Factually untrue. And although I said "football," since that's the local religion, I'll extend it to all college sports. Most universities operate deeply in the red on their sports programs.
You lot keep saying that if someone doesn't like how little money they're making, they should go get a degree. I pointed out exactly the treadmill involved (and a lot of other related problems) and only now do you get it. Except you probably don't. You don't need a degree to make more money than minimum wage, or enough money to support a family. Truck drivers, carpenters, construction, plumbers, electricians, bookkeepers, secretaries, sales people, etc., they don't require college degrees and yet, there are a lot of openings and demand for these people. College degrees aren't for everyone, I get that. But you don't need a degree to succeed if you know what's out there and what's needed.
Only person here who is saying that a degree is needed is you.
As to the rest of your ***, I'm starting to believe that you are thinking in absolute. If we aren't with you, we are against you, and since nobody is ever with you, everyone is against you.
And to you, anyone who has an idea or opinion is automatically wrong or made your point for you. Except, nobody know's what your point is, because you keep changing it.
Valefor.Endoq
Serveur: Valefor
Game: FFXI
Posts: 6906
By Valefor.Endoq 2015-04-25 14:30:23
low wages aren't the real problem. the real problem is that 1% of 1% control and own everything and the money grabbing they live for is hurting the other 99.99% of the worlds population.
By EpicFantasy 2015-04-25 21:52:14
Factually untrue. And although I said "football," since that's the local religion, I'll extend it to all college sports. Most universities operate deeply in the red on their sports programs.
You lot keep saying that if someone doesn't like how little money they're making, they should go get a degree. I pointed out exactly the treadmill involved (and a lot of other related problems) and only now do you get it. Except you probably don't. You don't need a degree to make more money than minimum wage, or enough money to support a family. Truck drivers, carpenters, construction, plumbers, electricians, bookkeepers, secretaries, sales people, etc., they don't require college degrees and yet, there are a lot of openings and demand for these people. College degrees aren't for everyone, I get that. But you don't need a degree to succeed if you know what's out there and what's needed.
Only person here who is saying that a degree is needed is you.
As to the rest of your ***, I'm starting to believe that you are thinking in absolute. If we aren't with you, we are against you, and since nobody is ever with you, everyone is against you.
And to you, anyone who has an idea or opinion is automatically wrong or made your point for you. Except, nobody know's what your point is, because you keep changing it.
+2
Seems the covert point maker has blocked me. I leave calling his lies in your capable hands.
Asura.Saevel
Serveur: Asura
Game: FFXI
Posts: 9658
By Asura.Saevel 2015-04-26 00:06:25
Quote: As to the rest of your ***, I'm starting to believe that you are thinking in absolute. If we aren't with you, we are against you, and since nobody is ever with you, everyone is against you.
This is the mindset of all fanatics, it's the human binary thinking taken to the extreme. They view themselves as the underdogs, the heroes, fighting against the oppressors who are the villains. And because they think their fight is a just fight they will use whatever means necessary to achieve victory over those they perceive as villains.
The litmus test to determine if someone is a fanatic is what their definition of "middle ground" or "compromise" is.
Not a Fanatic:
Middle ground / compromise is somewhere between my side and your side, a solution that favors neither of us. And while I may not agree with your position, I will respect it.
Fanatic:
Middle ground / compromise is somewhere between all of my side and most of my side, a solution that favors me while only slightly benefiting you. Since you are the villain you should be happy with anything us righteous heroes allow you to keep.
By fonewear 2015-04-26 07:42:28
"As to the rest of your ***, I'm starting to believe that you are thinking in absolute. If we aren't with you, we are against you, and since nobody is ever with you, everyone is against you."
Only a FFXIAH user deals in absolutes !
By fonewear 2015-04-26 07:44:26
On a related note:
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By fonewear 2015-04-26 07:48:25
There can be no middle ground it is written in the P and R bylaws. Either you are for abortion or against. For raising the min wage or against it. For big *** or against it ! Unless...of course you like medium *** !
[+]
Asura.Saevel
Serveur: Asura
Game: FFXI
Posts: 9658
By Asura.Saevel 2015-04-26 07:53:52
Quote: For big *** or against it ! Unless...of course you like medium *** !
Those heathens! How could anyone stand to not squash their face in big, firm, bouncy, juicy jugs. Death to the nonbelievers I say!
[+]
By fonewear 2015-04-26 07:55:56
Can you imagine a big *** woman president she could solve all our problems ! Or distract us from said problems. Either way I'd watch the news more often.
Should be in my dating profile online:
[+]
Valefor.Endoq
Serveur: Valefor
Game: FFXI
Posts: 6906
By Valefor.Endoq 2015-04-26 14:39:30
low wages aren't the real problem. the real problem is that 1% of 1% control and own everything and the money grabbing they live for is hurting the other 99.99% of the worlds population. My friend replied with this:
Quote: your right there not the real problem because we are dealing with low wage jobs and lesser paying jobs and pretty much part time only aspects because of free trade deals
Americans are spending $153 billion a year to subsidize McDonald’s and Wal-Mart’s low wage workers
The Washington post
And because its behind a paywall....
Quote: The low wages paid by businesses, including some of the largest and most profitable companies in the U.S. – like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart – are costing taxpayers nearly $153 billion a year.
After decades of wage cuts and health benefit rollbacks, more than half of all state and federal spending on public assistance programs goes to working families who need food stamps, Medicaid, or other support to meet basic needs. Let that sink in — American taxpayers are subsidizing people who work — most of them full-time (in some case more than full-time) because businesses do not pay a living wage.
Workers like Terrence Wise, a 35-year-old father who works part-time at McDonald’s and Burger King in Kansas City, Mo., and his fiancée Myosha Johnson, a home care worker, are among millions of families in the U.S. who work an average of 38 hours per week but still rely on public assistance. Wise is paid $8.50 an hour at his McDonald’s job and $9 an hour at Burger King. Johnson is paid just above $10 an hour, even after a decade in her field. Wise and Johnson together rely on $240 a month in food stamps to feed their three kids, a cost borne by taxpayers.
The problem of low wages and the accompanying public cost extends far beyond the fast-food industry. Forty-eight percent of home care workers rely on public assistance. In child care, it’s 46 percent. Among part-time college faculty—some of the most highly educated workers in the country—it’s 25 percent.
Ebony Hughes is paid $7.50 an hour as a home care worker in Durham, N.C., and has a second job at a local KFC. While the home care industry has the fastest growing number of jobs in America, these workers are some of the lowest paid in the country – earning, on average, $13,000 a year. To get enough hours to pay the bills, Hughes works from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. But she and her daughter still rely on public assistance to make ends meet.
UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education, which I chair, has analyzed state spending for Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and federal spending for those programs as well as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
We found that, on average, 52 percent of state public assistance spending supports working families (defined as working for at least 26 weeks a year and 10 hours a week) – with costs as high as $3.7 billion in California, $3.3 billion in New York, and $2 billion in Texas.
In recent months, the substantial public cost of low wages has prompted elected officials to take action. Legislators in California, Colorado, Maine, Oregon, and Washington are considering increasing the minimum wage to $12 an hour. In Connecticut, a proposal currently moving through the state legislature would fine large companies that pay low wages in an effort to recoup the costs imposed on taxpayers.
When 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs live in a working family, our economy isn’t operating the way it should – and could – be. From 2003-2013, inflation-adjusted wages fell for the entire bottom 70 percent of the workforce. Over the same time period we have also seen a large decline in the share of Americans with job-based health coverage.
Today – on Tax Day – underpaid workers are striking and protesting in cities across the country and around the globe to call for $15 an hour and the right to form a union. Their success would increase family incomes for tens of millions of adjunct professors, fast-food, home care and child care workers, among other underpaid workers. Raising wages would also generate significant savings to state and federal governments, and allow them to better target how our tax dollars are used.
Public assistance programs provide a vital support system for American families. But when Americans like Wise, Johnson and Hughes are working as hard as they can and are still paid too little to get by without public support, we need action to raise wages. On Tax Day it is a good time to take a hard look at the high public cost of low wages in the United States.
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