The Goat Pen

I think universities should have some skin in the game

If they are receiving financial incentives from the federal government they should have something like penalties for falling below a certain % of job placement in degrees offered

Not a fan of that. The universities don't control the market, or the number of jobs open. They offer the education that the students seek. So, you go to acting school and don't get a job as an actor, you get your money back?

What would the cut-off be? You get your degree in fine arts, but take 5 years to get published, they take back some of the school's money and then give it back later?


Yikes. No.

AlabamAlum wrote:Not a fan of that. The universities don't control the market, or the number of jobs open. They offer the education that the students seek. So, you go to acting school and don't get a job as an actor, you get your money back?

What would the cut-off be? You get your degree in fine arts, but take 5 years to get published, they take back some of the school's money and then give it back later?


Yikes. No.

the problem is they have the government backing them with little or no consequences.

We want to have a first rate football program and a state of the art student center - so we're going to jack up tuition prices at 4X the rate of inflation. The government will guarantee student loans so we know we'll get the money without any concern of if at the end of the day we are meeting the students needs.

If it were free market, limited numbers of student who could actually attend college would force them to be more competitive in their costs and delivering a quality education.

“All you black American people, fuck you all…just go to the office and pick up your check,” the supervisor at Hamilton Growers told workers during a mass layoff in June 2009.

The following season, according to a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, about 80 workers, many of them black, were simply told: “All you Americans are fired.”

Year after year, Hamilton Growers, which has supplied squash, cucumbers, and other produce to Wal-Mart and the Green Giant brand, hired scores of Americans, only to cast off many of them within weeks, according to the U.S. government. And time after time, the grower filled the jobs with foreign guest workers instead.

Although Hamilton Growers eventually agreed to pay half a million dollars to settle the suit, company officials said the allegations are baseless. Mass firings never happened, they said, nor did anyone use racially inflammatory language. But workers tell a different story.

“We want to go to work and work all day,” said Derrick Green, 32, a father of six who said he was fired by Hamilton Growers in 2012 after only three weeks picking squash. “But they don’t want that.”


http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison ... #.ppDqPxYp

eCat wrote:

AlabamAlum wrote:Not a fan of that. The universities don't control the market, or the number of jobs open. They offer the education that the students seek. So, you go to acting school and don't get a job as an actor, you get your money back?

What would the cut-off be? You get your degree in fine arts, but take 5 years to get published, they take back some of the school's money and then give it back later?


Yikes. No.

the problem is they have the government backing them with little or no consequences.

We want to have a first rate football program and a state of the art student center - so we're going to jack up tuition prices at 4X the rate of inflation. The government will guarantee student loans so we know we'll get the money without any concern of if at the end of the day we are meeting the students needs.

If it were free market, limited numbers of student who could actually attend college would force them to be more competitive in their costs and delivering a quality education.

Most of the student centers and what not at most of the universities or donation based or supplemented. Money goes for faculty, labs, research, and the like. You start tying job procurement, colleges will just cancel the ones that don't break even, and even then a thousand other questions would open up: someone graduates and decides not to work, does the school get dinged? If the person gets a degree in communications, but takes a job in another field, do they get dinged? If the applicant gets laid off, school dinged? If the school kicks the student out before graduation, what happens? What about if the kick quits or changes majors?

Thankfully, It'll never happen; it would be disastrous if it did.

I don't expect it to happen, but Universities need to be accountable. In the 70's and early 80's, college tuition at state schools was low enough that a person could work a summer job to cover it. Now they have to pay for their education for 10 years after they graduate.

tuition costs have come to the point that there is blowback against schools, especially state schools that have put education costs beyond what their state recipients are able to reasonably afford - that should have never been allowed to happen.

You start tying job procurement, colleges will just cancel the ones that don't break even

and that's what exactly should happen. The idea that a university can charge students 80K for an education that has little economic value in today's workplace paid for by government backed loans that hold their credit and living standards hostage until they are paid back is absurd - a loan at which our own government makes a profit of in the billions.

and that's what exactly should happen.

Oh no. Not at all. We have a fundamental disagreement in philosophy.

A university is more than a job training center; a place for employment training. A tech school? Sure. ITT Tech or devry or a community college? Sure.

A university is more than just turning young people into nurses and engineers. It's the arts, and music, and literature, and research, and so-called lessor majors that aren't at the top of the job centers' wish lists. Things that enrich our communities and our lives regardless if they are directly tied as a feeder to a big industry and sign-on bonuses. Even with "bad" undergrad degrees, like communications, they often offer a road to a decent job or a grad degree that does which helps the individual avoid a lifetime as a McDonald's or Wal-Mart clerk which helps the borderline students and society as a whole.

AlabamAlum wrote:

and that's what exactly should happen.

Oh no. Not at all. We have a fundamental disagreement in philosophy.

A university is more than a job training center; a place for employment training. A tech school? Sure. ITT Tech or devry or a community college? Sure.

A university is more than just turning young people into nurses and engineers. It's the arts, and music, and literature, and research, and so-called lessor majors that aren't at the top of the job centers' wish lists. Things that enrich our communities and our lives regardless if they are directly tied as a feeder to a big industry and sign-on bonuses. Even with "bad" undergrad degrees, like communications, they often offer a road to a decent job or a grad degree that does which helps the individual avoid a lifetime as a McDonald's or Wal-Mart clerk which helps the borderline students and society as a whole.

Its not a difference in philosophy - I believe that universities should offer that

but once they began benefiting from 90% of students taking in government backed loans - they now have an obligation to the taxpayer.

I'm attempting to find a way to quantify what that obligation is.

Perhaps for state run schools adjusting tuition increases to reflect the economic scale of the students they represent and then capping tuition to a cost of living index

Then in a sense they would be responsible for job income because their fortunes are tied to the growth of the state they represent.

Universities will NOT offer that if it's tied to work procurement in that field, though.

No they do NOT have an obligation to the taxpayer. At all. The obligation to the tax payer is the person who took the loan. They had a choice to take the loan or not. That's like holding the maker of a metal detector responsible for whether I find enough gold and silver rings at the beach to make the purchase worth my financial investment.

Universities aren't really making money now. Any contrived reduction in funds via rebates to the government because people don't pay their loan backs would mean a reduction in the non-professional degree paths, scholarships, research, and extra-curriculars.

I think we are too fundamentally apart on this to reach an accord. So, I will close with "roll tide".

guess what my wife got me for Xmas

http://www.goatpen.net/forums/viewtopic ... ne#p130644

I just got around to getting it out of the box today

I've already cut the shit out of my finger - I was holding it in one hand with and had the remote under my arm and pressed the joystick forward.

Always turn off the remote before picking up something with 4 blades

You gonna take it to the beach? That's the big thing.

AlabamAlum wrote:You gonna take it to the beach? That's the big thing.

no - I *might* take a video of my house once I get the hang of it.

then most likely I'll put it up and never use it again.

Right now I have to get past the idea of when its 15 feet in the air and I don't want it to do something to not just take my thumb off the controller - its a natural reaction that results in the damn thing immediately crashing to the ground. I have no idea what she paid for it but it streams in HD so it wasn't cheap.

oh I might chase the cat with it too

lol...

Taking high rez pics of girls sunbathing -for research purposes- helps with ROI.

[youtube]v8giKWu4OLg[/youtube]

I bought one a year or so ago. I think it's still on the roof.

So drones are just basically remote controlled helicopters like we used to play with as kids but with cameras mounted on them?

Yes.

Except they go higher

My BIL got one for Christmas. He's going to use it (once he gets the hang of it) to film races my nephew runs in track. At least that's his plan. Many people do lose their drones, though. They either fly them out of range, or they get caught in weird, hard to access spaces and are not found. My BIL said his version has a "return home" button where if he can't find it, and it's still in flight and not stuck, he can push the button and it comes right back to him and lands at his feet. It also has some "Follow Me" button, also, that you can use while you kayak or something like that and you don't have to control it while it films you.

All that said, I can't think of any reason why I will ever have one. I did see one on Shark Tank last week that had all 5 sharks go in on a syndicated deal for. It costs $1,800, flies as fast as 60 mph and has a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet (although most regulations cap the flight height to 700). It was a cool display of the technology, but still can't figure out why I would get one. The company the sharks invested in also has a prototype, that uses your phone as the camera and the drone (blades) are basically a case for the phone. Considering how decent phone cameras are, that's not a bad deal (and the price point was attractive). I can't imagine losing your drone and your phone on the same day, though.

and with all that said, eCat, once you get the hang of your "boring" drone you can just upgrade...

[youtube]MjG1n9FEDb0[/youtube]