The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

I don't know the exact details of how your current system works. From what I understand when talking about "college" we're talking about what I'd call university? How does your current system work? Maybe we should tell each other what out current system stands for before we throw opinions at each other lol. If you're really poor in the US what ways are there to get high level education? Who can you ask to to pay college for you? Are their big government help programs in some way?

Well here in Germany the system works roughly like this:
- The state pays for university operation costs.
- Additionally there is a lot of cooperation between universities and the industry. They give money to Universities so they put research focus on stuff they are interested in.
- Students pay very little, like that bus ticket stuff I explained before.
- There is an easy to get government support for students to pay for their living costs. If you are an average person you can get them pay you the bare minimum money you need to have a place to live and food. Once you're done with your studies you have to pay back 50% of the money.
- There are still private universities and stuff that cost money, so if you're feeling like part of the elite you can go there if you want.
- The problem of "10000 students want to study subject X in university Y, but it only has 100 spots this year" is solved by putting students into a list, order them by their a-level graduation marks and the best 100 get the spots. In some areas, like medicine, this means you need near perfect marks to get in.

No common sense is taught by the environment you live in

I feel like these two videos from @nicb1 posted here https://forums.uberent.com/threads/the-murrica-politics-thread.70907/page-11#post-1124197
got no attention at all :

Yes university is a synonym in this case.

American colleges require both money and grades. When I say grades I mean standardized scores like the SAT, effort, etc. Broad term. Both expenses and grades range heavily, from not-so-great grades getting you into a community college that sometimes costs less than $1000 per year (to put in perspective, $1000 is less than my PC rig cost which is probably worth $1400.) to the ultra elite colleges like Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Duke, MIT, UCLA, Berkeley, Emory, etc. There are a lot. You'll need perfect test scores and a very high GPA (basically, a measure of your overall effort in high school/secondary school) to get accepted to these colleges, and you'll also need rich *** parents.

But, there definitely are support programs for college expenses. Scholarships are among the most popular, I have applied for those myself and now I don't have to pay $2000 back for student loans. Scholarships are also like applying for a college except you don't need to pay to get accepted. Oh yeah, student loans. Usually students can't afford a full college tuition so they borrow money like for house payments. They end up in debt after though, usually a lot too.

FAFSA forms are government thingies where the government basically pays for some of your college based on your family's social class and income. Those help too but middle class people tend to get screwed for those.

Overall making college free will mess everything up.

that's the important bit you kinda scooch under the couch.

sure there are support programs. great support programs! but all combined they cater to the 1% of the 1% of the 1% basically.

think about it. you could be catering to the 80%. the 80% that are poor as bare bones.

I am not arguing against prestige high end elite universities.
Question is how often do you get the "less than 1000$ a year with government help to pay for your living expenses"-situation? Is it ensured that all people who're intelligent enough get that option?
How are the payback requirements on those loans? Are they loans in the "they'll make you pay back even more"-kind of sense?

1000$ might be possible for you and me. Problem is there are people for whom that actually may be a problem and they need to be helped.

I acknowledge the aim of "getting people from poor and less educated background up to a high educated position only through their own hard work" is not an easy one, but at least it should not fail due to money.

Personally I pay for my college by taking some student loans and working 30+ hours a week at two jobs. The majority of folks who don't actually have the income to do this are either A) lazy or B) shouldn't be in college.

College isn't for everyone. As an example, a friend of mine had the opportunity to attend Harvard (MIT too, I think) and he turned it down to start a kite making business. He's finished his Associates (two year degree) and has made enough money to pay for a four year school (not Harvard) without any debt. Brilliant guy.

Also, tatsu, if you legit have financial issues stemming from your upbringing (poor family, no family, etc.), all you need are good grades and decent writing skills to get scholarships that will pay almost all the expenses of going to college and then some. Those people are taken care of in our system. The main issue that I've seen is people who are lazy as **** and get terrible grades AND complain they aren't getting enough money to pay for school. Those people are quite common, and they don't deserve the degree because they won't work for it. Those people whine the loudest about free college, when they shouldn't even be in college.

no that's the thing. they can provide these to so few people tops that you have to be in the top 1%% of the 1% of the 1% ... and then some. to actually obtain them.

yes they can pay you Harvard and 100% of your schooling but I'm sure you'll realize : the one who got 100% on his SATs BUT was black or didn't have sufficient recommendation letters. or you know was just 99.99% or some **** is gonna be perfectly vindicated in complaining as the very least of things (i feel).

In the end the question is how true it is that everyone good enough really gets the money they need. I am doubtful about that, but am too lazy to look up numbers to support/disprove my thoughts and you don't seem to have any hard numbers on hand either.
After a quick google I can tell you that our government program to support students financially
currently supports ~650k students and 278k non-university scholars (whatever a better word for them is in english xD) and on average pays out 448€ per student.

How many people get those scholarships?

What I can say is that I think school, including university, should just be free. The ability to go and learn stuff is a good thing to provide everyone for free. When looking at the wealth of a country I'd always also look at how good the education system is and free access to university is part of that imho.

I wonder: Do you guys have lower failure rates in your universities? In some subjects and some exams we have extreme failure rates. Worst I've seen so far in one exam was a math exam I had. 50% of the people who attended the exam failed and only maybe 50% of those who started the course even tried the exam.
Overall for my subject, Computer Science, less than 50% who start to study complete the whole thing. Others drop out early mainly due to failing too many exams.
Though Computer Science in most years doesn't cut out anybody due to having not enough open spots, which would mean to not accept people with bad marks. They have enough open spots for people that anybody who has an "Abitur" (I think that is your A-levels?) can give it a try. Probably one reason why so many fail at it.
But then again, that math exam, together with a few others in the very first semester filtered out so many people that by now everyone can have two seats in most of my lectures.
Having to pay money might push people to work harder. Maybe. Wasting years on failing your studies in the end is costly either way, food and stuff still cost many after all. So maybe not.

My respect btw at your workload with those 30+ hours of work plus university.

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandr...niversities/freshmen-least-most-likely-return

Retention basically means the opposite of failure in this case. This is for the entire college, not just a class.

You'll probably notice that there are a lot of colleges. If you click on a college, scroll down and you'll find the 4-year grad. rate.

Living on campus can do wonders for how many hours you can work. A 1 hour commute really sucks if I want to work that much (oh, and gas! 80mi a day...), and living on campus is an extra 5-$8000 a semester (or year, I have no idea which, since I'm not paying for that).

In some programs, yes, we do have relatively high failure/change of major rates. Engineering is usually a pretty difficult program (I think partially due to the math?), while other programs are much easier. One of my buddies (3rd year mechanical engineer) was in a machine design class with a <50% pass rate, and as he has noticed that as he progresses, his class sizes are smaller, and quite a few people he started with have moved to easier majors.

Personally, I think that I would do better if I didn't have to work at all, or have to waste so much time driving because of the costs. Knowing that a course is free as long as you pass with an appropriate grade would be really nice, and I might actually consider taking more classes (for a double minor or a double major and the minor), or getting a graduate degree. Right now, I wouldn't go back unless it was free. I'd start to see a diminished return on my investment with regards to my career, especially since the graduate school is often more expensive per course.

Also @tatsujb he is socialist. Fairly textbook socialist, actually. In the United States, socialism tends to be thought of much like communism (thanks Cold War propaganda), and that's not really something that people want, considering how it has turned out throughout history. I had the convenient pleasure to go over three of the primary political ideologies in class today, and Socialism is defined as a relatively equal distribution of wealth by the government (directly or otherwise). So we still have our poor, and we still have our rich, and very rich, but the difference between the top and bottom is smaller, not the mention there would be less costly or free healthcare and other aid programs to help the poor while not just handing them money. Part of the issue is that people seem to have a huge aversion to taxing the rich, which few are a part of, and seem to think that giving the rich a tax break will net everybody more money. It just results in the rich getting richer, while taking advantage of even more of the "everybody." If you were to tax 50% of even a lousy $250K income, then they would still be making more money than most engineers, in any discipline (and more than my father, and closing on more than my father and mother combined). $125K isn't hurting for money unless they are total idiots, and while I don't know the tax system, I don't really think that the high taxation starts until you get into amounts of money that I can't even grasp having access to.

Goofed up the quotes a bit there. And I'm not sure if I should quote Cola quoting Mered, or just quote Mered. Whatever; you get the point.

You textbooks probably are sponsored by the rich who don't want to be taxed more
That skip from "wants to provide a better social state" to "anti-democratic communist" is the thing where it really goes wrong. I mean Kiwi directly said it a few pages ago: He thinks that Sanders social plans will take away his democracy and freedom.
Just wanting to provide better education or better health care to the poor while taxing the super rich more isn't communism. Communism means your government throws out the free market, makes a planned economy while getting rid of any sort of democratic freedom. Drastically different and you need to understand that difference.
If you want to argue "I want the rich to get even more rich and the poor to get even more poor" then please that's your moral standard who am I to judge you, but saying putting Bernie Sanders stances into one league with communism is just plain wrong.

Personally I think the idea of "don't tax the rich" is a good recipe to ruin a nation long term. The difference between rich and poor will grow worse and worse and at some point the people in the little red 40% dot here will start to grow violent because they realize how unfair the system is.


The only upper border on taxing the rich is the question: How much can we tax them before they leave the country?

I have a 10 minutes by foot distance to the university and I dunno where I would place 30 hours of work in my schedule.
Living on campus for many thousand $ is also a difference to what we have.
The university itself has no dorm, though the same government program that provides the support money also has a few dorms for students near the university that provide a small and cheap place to live in. Most people live in places they have rented themselves as close to the university as they can find obviously.

Yea i got the impression that the people using the word "socialism" in this thread all have very different concept of what that word means.

Socialism is the idea that every deserves some base level of comfort. Rules and regulations apply obviously. Since taxing is mostly by percentage, the rich (should) pay more in absolute numbers, but fairly similar in relative (percentage) numbers. Therefore, the burden is shared by the many, proportional to how much burden you *can* carry. $100 is a lot of money to some, but Larry Page or Bill Gates could throw a $100 bill on the ground every second and still get a profit. If it turns out that the average joe pays the (majority of the) price, then there's something wrong with how your taxes work, not with socialism.

Communism is the idea that everyone should get exactly the same amount, regardless of what you do. It's both a floor AND a ceiling, whereas Socialism is merely a floor.

Capitalism is the idea that reward is proportional to work. Which is a nice idea, except the majority of wealth is inherited, and so the rich are rich because they're born rich, then use those vast riches to get richer. Trump got rich because he started with a million dollars, and so is the poster boy of what's wrong with pure capitalism.

Ideally, a nation uses a mix of these ideas to work most effectively, obviously adapted to specific circumstances. Over here we used the income from gas to pay for a lot of things and raise the standard of living. Now that the gas bubble is running dry, some of that is being reverted. But we're also consistently in the top happiest nations, so i guess it's worth it.

Lastly: can we stop the myth that European education is a truly "free" thing? The goverment uses it as an investment, because of reasons that vary from nation to nation, but in my case it's because we are an exporter of high tech solutions (and a trade nation in general) and you don't really get far without a good education. Germany is an industrial nation that wants to be green really bad, which you can't really do without a ton of technical knowledge.

Europe invests in education this way. It's not charity, it's a deliberate economical strategy, that will pay itself back eventually.

America spends it's money differently. It has it's benefits, it has it's downsides

exactly the same. @mered4 How little do you go to school at all to have that kinda time left over? I can't even find room to game.

Um. I'm really smart and don't have to study as much/hard as everyone else?
I'm not in school right now (ran outta dough) but during the semester I'm working 30 and studying for 40ish, with minimal sleep and ofc gaming when I have the spare time.

It depend on the area, but for the most part you'll get the money you need for schooling if you look for it. I've helped a couple friends at food stamps level poverty and middle-class doesn't get as much gov-money levels balance their books to pay for school. America actually has a very solid post-secondary system. The county is huge and that doesn't apply everywhere, but on average we're good.

And it's a misconception that you need both grades and money to get into ivy league. If you can get in, they will make sure you can afford it. Those schools are carried by grants and donations by alumni, not tuition. As a result, their failure rates are also very low because they only allow in people that can take it.

On the other hand, out secondary education system in most of the country is a nightmare. The number of people ready for college across the country is abysmal. What we need isn't free college, we need the funding that would go there to improving our elementary and secondary education systems.

I feel like it's time for lightening the mood again x) watch : "the campaign"

but how are the professors gonna get paid?

we've been over this. The same way everyone else who works for the government is getting paid: From Taxes. And if there is not enough of those you take more of them from the rich part of your population. It's not gonna ruin them to have to pay a few more $.
Since nobody here is actually gonna put in the work to make an exact analysis of the numbers it ends with your believe against ours whether it works out or not.

Tunsels argument isn't really water proof though, sadly there are higher educated people among Trump/Afd Voters.

Intelligence doesn't protected anyone from being stupid I guess.
If you're the stupid one or me, only time will tell.

but how will the gov pay them when it's almost $20 trillion in debt? I'd not like to increase taxes btw.

See my edit: Tax the rich. No that won't hurt anyone. The rich are rich and a few more taxes won't change that. It is just that the majority of your politicians are actually rich so they tend to make lots of propaganda that higher taxes for rich people are bad out of self interest.
Actually I think that is the biggest problem in US politics, at least it always comes to my mind in presidential vote-times: You are ruled by filthy rich people. To be successful in politics in the US it seems you first need to be super rich and economically successful. Around here politicians aren't exactly poor either, but it somehow feels a lot less.... extreme. I don't know of any German politician who is as rich as Trump and co.

But really what do I know about the finances of the USA. I dunno where all your money is going and my stance on the whole financial system is a pretty simple "the next big crash is guaranteed to happen" anyway.
I can only tell you: Germany and many other nations manage to get it done somehow. Where is your sense of competition, are you saying the US can't manage the same?