Watching C-Span this week, I happened to take in what money Obama was proposing to spend as part of the Stimulus. One of those items was money to improve the availability of education for all who desire a better education, but can’t afford it. It reminded me of the rapid growth in cost to obtain a good education. And coupled with this proposal were two stories in the local paper the past few days concerning contributions of some college students.
It seems that the communications satellite to be put into polar orbit by India in April was designed by college students and their instructors at Madras University in India. Another newspaper story carried the information that a new method for detecting breast cancer had been developed by students and instructors at the University of Arkansas. The detection method analyzes the chemical composition of tears collected from the eyes to detect telltale indications of the breast cancer. Now that’s money well spent and knowledge and experience almost impossible for young minds to get in any other scenario.
That the instructors and students collaborated to provide something useful to society is proof that this method can be replicated at every classroom in every school in America. And the cost benefit ratio could be beyond the breadth of imagination. Maybe a cure for cancer could someday come from just such an activity. What we can imagine is the only limit to our achievements as a specie.
Concerning the affordability of education, I began to consider that with high cost comes a paring of the intelligence pool from which innovations arise in the world. Intelligence is not a product of wealth, but wealth is a limiter on those able to enhance their education, and by inference, the ability to use the intelligence structure that was given at birth. Speaking to a couple of college students recently and talking about the cost of education, one of the students told me that he had already spent in excess of $100,000 seeking a degree for his future. Not many young people have access to that amount of money to spend on education. And those who can borrow that amount would face a formidable obstacle to solvency when they graduate.
Obama wants to make higher education more affordable by changing the ratio of grants to loans, from 70% loans to 70 % grants. I think this is a good idea, and would be money well spent, but I also would like to see more emphasis on providing “projects” for the students in collaboration with instructors. Obviously this would require better instructors and more cooperation with all segments of society to identify needs and prioritize them. This need would also indicate that teacher pay should be tied to performance. However that idea is a hot potato with teachers unions and tenure at Colleges and Universities. There is a wealth of opportunity for improvement in our educational system. We need to direct money there before we bailout another “To Big to Fail Private Enterprise”. Because if anything on our planet is “To big to fail” it should be the vast untapped potential of our educational system.
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[...] Populist Party Blog placed an interesting blog post on On Money We Should Be Spending for Our FutureHere’s a brief overviewWatching C-Span this week, I happened to take in what money Obama was proposing to spend as part of the Stimulus. One of those items was money to improve the availability of education for all who desire a better education, but can’t afford it. It reminded me of the rapid growth in cost to obtain a good education. And coupled with this proposal were two stories in the local paper the past few days concerning contributions of some college students. It seems that the communications satellite t [...]
I’d rather them not spend any of our money at all, especially since they use the “public” education system as a way to inculcate all our kids with ideas that government is always the savior….and freedom doesn’t work.
But, if they’re going to steal from us anyway, I would say that education would be a far better spend, even in its worst form, than spending it on bombing and shooting people.
Frank. I envision a scenario where education is absolutely free for those who want to continue to built their knowledge. The return could be tremendous. Innovations are not likely without input from those who have the basic knowledge of what is and what can be. Just think of the two events I mentioned in the article. And also think of those events multiplied all across our educational system.
And when you think about it, all costs to provide education come from the taxpayer already. The structure is there for every level from First grade thru Universities.
What the tuition does is limit who can attend.
My point in the article is that by limiting the students to those who can afford upper education, we are paring the pool of possible achievers.
The amount of marginal cost needed to provide free education to every one would be less than 1% of what it costs to conduct our illegal and immoral wars. And I think that most would agree that those who profit from these wars are not the lowest on the economic scale, rather those who profit most are the rich and powerful. They are the people who can pay for their education, no matter the cost.
I think you’re absolutely right about education being a far better and far more economical way to spend this money, but I don’t want any of it going through the federal government in the first place. If we kept the money at home, in our states and communities, we’d have even more to use for important things like education. The feds steal and waste.
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