Everyone benefits from having enough doctors and nurses to staff hospitals, enough engineers to design roads and bridges, enough writers to keep our entertainment industry going, enough teachers to keep the next generation going, enough research to find the next medicines or the next car or the next fuel. In order to produce these people, we need to have colleges and universities. In order to produce the best caliber of trained professionals, we need to find ways for the smartest, most driven kids to attend these universities.
The tragedy of the commons isn’t taught often enough these days. The future is the commons. Not enough people have the foresight to invest in the future on their own, but luckily enough people are willing to occasionally elect someone who prompts the government do it for us.
@newHSmom do you drive on roads (designed and built by engineers)? Have you ever been to the emergency room (staffed by doctors and nurses)? Do you work in a building taller than one story (designed by an architect)? Do you use a computer (programmed by developers)? Are you protected by the military (equipment designed by engineers)? Do you drive a car (designed by engineers)?
People need college educations to build or maintain all those things. Some percentage of those people has gone to school with government assistance.
I am a big fan of making sure we are working off of the same definitions.
So, as mentioned above, I would consider the benefits to society from education to be all the various branches of engineering and how they keep improving our roads, access to information, widespread electrical power (sorry PR, I guess not for you), best practices in early childhood education, vaccines and health care innovations, protection of legal rights for our vulnerable, flood control measures, weather predictions (very important to not head out into a blizzard forecast, …
None of these happen in a vacuum. I want all brains working on the problems of today, not just the brains that can afford to be full pay at college. My father in law was a migrant farm worker. His granddaughter is working on cancer research. If public education was not available to my father in law’s generation, his granddaughter’s brain would not be working on a treatment for a terrible disease.
@“Snowball City” Providing incentives to complete the program in a reasonable time serves to lead to successful outcomes from the PELL grant. I agree with the general point regarding general social benefits. Paying out grants that do not lead to graduation is a unrecoverable loss that weights on us all rather than benefiting us.
@newHSmom -As others have already mentioned even some college can provide great benefits to the student. And not graduating is not a “unrecoverable loss”…
@newHSmom I don’t work in education - I work in economic development. Do you really want to continue this? If so, I can provide mountains of data about how education benefits general society, especially in regard to economic development and quality of place, even if people don’t finish college.
We fund K-12, but we put a lot of requirements on it. We don’t let students stay in the first grade for 4 years and we make sure they are taking math, reading, as well as some art and music. We assess progress and fix any problems as they arise.
Pell money is given to the student and she can do with it what she wants. Just art classes, just math. No oversight that this student will actually graduate. I don’t have a problem with oversight.
But this is very unlikely to happen. This is just a bill being introduced to stir up discussion and distract from other bills going through congress.
“investing in education expands job opportunities, boosts America’s competitiveness, and supports the kind of income mobility that is fundamental to a growing economy”
"Higher education provides extensive benefits to students, including higher wages, better health, and a lower likelihood of requiring disability payments (Oreopoulos and Petronijevic 2013). A population that is more highly educated also confers wide-ranging benefits to the economy, such as lower rates of unemployment (Greenstone and Looney 2011) and higher wages even for workers without college degrees (Moretti 2004).
“A postsecondary degree can also serve as a buffer against unemployment during economic downturns. Those with postsecondary degrees saw more steady employment through the Great Recession (Autor 2014), and the vast majority of net jobs created during the economic recovery went to college-educated workers (Carnevale, Jayasundera, and Gulish 2016).”
From the National Conference of State Legislatures:
"When all citizens have the opportunity and resources to succeed in
the education system, the state reaps the rewards of an educated and
productive citizenry. The benefits of a highly educated citizenry include
improving the state’s economy, meeting future workforce needs, and
improving the state’s quality of life.
“Higher education has often been primarily valued as a benefit for
the individual, but an educated citizenry significantly benefits the
state. That is the fundamental principle behind the higher educationeconomic
development linkage.”
I would like to step back and talk about what makes America great, and the implicit underlying social contracts.
America is a rich country. This is largely due to the fact that America rewards risk taking, innovation, and hard work by allowing successful people to keep more of what they earned than other countries with extensive social programs. It is also far more forgiving of failure than other countries. These attributes have traditionally made America a magnet for the world’s innovators.
The great thing is that this wealth creation benefits most of the population. Take any collection of countries that add up to 320M people, and America’s median income will far exceed that of any combination you could come up with.
But part of key part of the social contract is that this opportunity must be available to everyone, including those at the bottom. This begins by providing every child with good nutrition, a strong K-12 education, and affordable health care.
Afterwards, those that are willing and able should have a path to college. The Pell Grant is an important part of this social contract. Of course, some will attempt to go through college and fail. But if America is forgiving to innovators that fail, should we not forgive when the less fortunate among us fail in trying to improve their lives?
I think there was a good point earlier in the thread about holding accountable the mostly for-profit colleges that don’t deliver the education and skills they promise to. They undermine the work the students are willing to do to improve their lives. Many dollars of Pell, student loans, and veteran’s benefit are sucked into that hole.
“We fund K-12, but we put a lot of requirements on it. We don’t let students stay in the first grade for 4 years and we make sure they are taking math, reading, as well as some art and music. We assess progress and fix any problems as they arise.”
Again, as previously mentioned, the Pell programs does incorporate standards of satisfactory progress. That’s different than what this bill represents.
“investing in education expands job opportunities, boosts America’s competitiveness, and supports the kind of income mobility that is fundamental to a growing economy”
Seems REALLY obvious, doesn’t it? I find it astonishing that anyone would question this.
Some people may have an “extractive” mindset, where their goal is to maximize their percentage of the pie, even if the result is that the pie gets smaller, rather than trying to make the pie bigger, so that even a smaller percentage of the pie is larger in an absolute sense. This ties in with the tendency of people to think in terms of relative social status, rather than absolute benefit.
It is likely that, in many poor countries with poor economic growth, such an “extractive” mindset dominates political thinking.
For students who started in fall 2002 as full-time students seeking a bachelor’s degree but failed to graduate six years later, the cost to the nation was approximately:
• $3.8 billion in lost income;
• $566 million in lost federal income taxes; and
• $164 million in lost state income taxes.
These estimated losses are for one year and for one class of students. Because the losses for these students accumulate year after year, these estimates understate the overall costs of low college graduation rates.
