But the idea that government is responsible for childcare falls into the camp of making government bigger and bigger to “fix” every issue. Yet, the issues don’t make society better. Iceland is a tiny country with a tiny population, low population density and a fairly high income. To compare their needs and solutions to the US with it’s dense cities, various demographics and all the rest is like comparing apples and oranges.
Is the idea of paid governmental child care attractive to many? Yes, but what are the tradeoffs. What about the people who have no children? Do we raise their taxes also? What about the people who have worked it out so that one parent stays home or works a different shift should they also pay?
The underlying issue for me is, there is an endless supply of wants and if some believe the government should provide these we all have to agree. You can’t throw money at every problem. And you can’t throw government solutions at every issue either. It just doesn’t work.
That’s precisely the problem of long-term poverty, and of growing up poor, and intergenerational poverty. John Scalzi’s described it all beautifully so I won’t repeat, but if you learn to think short-term because you have no choice but to do that, the idea that you have a long-term is extremely difficult to foster. That is exactly the problem that so many of the kids at Average State U have. The goal is to get a degree. Full stop. What comes after? They don’t know, because they’ve never been taught to think of the arc of their own lives. Nothing in their lives has taught them that they have that degree of control. On the contrary, they’re taught (and for good reason) that they have no control, and that the control is in God’s hands. So the ceiling on their thinking is quite low. Again, a different world from Miss Vassar’s.
I’m working now with a returning student around 40 who’s got no end of drive and motivation, but every large suggestion I make is a surprise. He comes from a very poor family, and the main thing they do is take care of each other, because that’s what they have. The suggestion that he could do X or Y with his next few decades is a revelation every time. He’s got a mind like a steel trap, but this kind of thinking has just not been part of his world. All he’s looking for is a steady job with a decent income. Very capable fellow, capable of considerably more than that.
Probably quite a bit of credentialism is based on protecting incumbent practitioners. There are some aspects of some professions that are getting more complex, so that they may actually require more education and training, but that may be used as a reason to increase credentialism greater than the actual need based on that.
Some historical examples where one can consider how much is due to actual need for additional education due to increasing complexity of the profession, versus protecting incumbents from competition:
Law: it used to be possible to get a law degree without a bachelor’s degree.
Accounting: now there is a 150 credit (5 academic year) requirement of college education for CPA licensing.
Occupational therapy: was a bachelor’s degree, now is a master’s degree.
Physical therapy: was a master’s degree, now is a professional doctorate.
Using IQ tests and such (as opposed to testing for the actual job skills) for employment assumes that the employer is willing to employ someone who can learn the needed skills on the job at an employer willing to do on-the-job training or allow for on-the-job self-education. Employers appear to be much less willing to do that now than before, so they expect employees to have become educated/trained/credentialed at their own expense prior to being hired.
I think the bigotry of low expectations is powerful. You have no idea that he doesn’t think big picture. How do you know what he really wants? Everyone has dreams. And people might just see college as a stepping stone. I did. They need to get that degree to think of the next step. Doesn’t mean it isn’t coming. Just one step at a time. This conversation keeps coming back to the same thing. Poverty, in your opinion is inescapable and the government needs to step in to redistribute and change things. I think personal agency is very powerful. These are very different paths to financial stability. On the one hand, the person is in control, on the other he/she is reliant on the government programs to work and work well. We’ve seen gov’t agencies rarely work well.
When we give $, we always give to programs that create agency. The last thing I want to do is to think I know what someone else wants/needs. We want to give someone the tools they need not the actual $.
That was a big jump, from credentialing to Government Childcare. But.
Spend some time exploring the Head Start program, which is massive and has been a giant force in allowing poor women to work and go to school, and the nationwide patchwork of state and county programs providing childcare for the same reason where Head Start doesn’t provide full coverage, and I think a new landscape of Government Childcare will reveal itself to you, along with the reliance of a large chunk of the economy on it. We already have it. But because people pitch a fit reflexively about Government Services and Entitlements (while getting very upset if someone touches their tax-advantaged retirement and college-savings accounts), it has to operate as this weird, inefficient, bits and bobs, different-here-different-there set of rickety systems. Since we’re going to have it anyway, I think we really might as well just do it.
Around here, we started preschool for 4-year-olds as part of the school district maybe ten years ago. Here’s how many problems I’ve heard of coming from it: 0. Sure, if you want to send your kids somewhere else, that’s fine, you can. But if you need full-day care, and you don’t have cash, then there it is. Go work, go get your education.
It’s a chicken and egg situation. If you have no means of identifying high potential employees without qualifications (who would be “underpriced” relative to those with qualifications) the cost-benefit equation of investing to train them up is skewed against taking that risk.
It’s interesting to me that the armed forces still use intelligence tests that would be forbidden in most civilian jobs in order to determine who to invest their enormous training dollars in.
I mean this is part of why good education is expensive. It takes time to understand who students are and what they need, which is not a thing that happens if you’re trying to teach 800 kids at once.
Where did you get this notion? (Two of my kids have worked as Congressional staffers). There is an entire function called “constituent relations”, it is indeed staffed by very competent people who have no responsibility for campaign donations (handled by an entirely different office which is NOT housed in the big white building your tax dollars pay for). Virtually everyone they serve is needy, indigent, ill, or all three. These are people whose social security checks suddenly stopped- a staffer then discovers identity theft. Or the VA hospital has no record of an appointment made a week ago, because there is another Vet with the same name and the appointment got made with the right name, wrong information, wrong hospital. An immigrant who is days away from a green card gets a letter that they are getting deported, or days away from their citizenship test gets a letter telling them that their tourist visa (from 12 years ago) has expired and that they have to report to a consular office 500 miles away to take care of it.
Every congressperson has a constituent relations office, and these are people who are trained in who to call at social security, how to make noise at HUD, where the watchdogs for each agency or committee sit and how to alert them to something sketchy or nasty or just plain illegal going on.
Your cynicism is funny except when it is factually incorrect.
For sure, if you are a 12 year old pregnant girl in Arkansas who wants an abortion and your parents won’t give consent, good luck getting help from your congressperson’s constituent relations office-- the state laws are what’s harming you, not federal. But if you need help at a federal level, those assists exist.
Do the indigent know about these services? Not all of them, some of them. But your point that these people exist to raise money are marketing folks at heart is incorrect.
The more likely issue is that employer / employee loyalty is low, or perceived to be low by both. An employer will not be willing to invest in on-the-job training or allow for on-the-job self-education if the employee is likely to leave or be laid off in a short time.
US military service contracts assure that the service member will be in the military for a time frame that makes investing in on-the-job training worthwhile for the military. This is not the case for most private sector civilian employment.
Yes. And the last time I checked it was acceptable to ask a discharged person what their ASVAB score was.
Also on a recent thread on a completely different topic, someone mentioned (and I confirmed) that some types of employers ask SAT scores even from decades ago, for the same reason.
ASVAB is done as part of the recruitment test before you have signed up for a service contract. It is used to exclude potential service members who don’t have sufficient aptitude to be worth investing those training dollars in (and to classify recruits into different jobs, with a higher score needed for jobs that require more training).
Based on Sample Questions | ASVAB , it does not seem to be an “IQ test” so much as a skills and knowledge test covering some topics that one should have learned in high school (academic courses) and some topics that one may have learned on one’s own outside of high school (or in high school shop classes). Of course, the results of the ASVAB or any skills test can be affected by IQ (however defined), but to say that it is an “IQ test” seems inaccurate.
In my view ,the growing inequality in the country and our declining rate of social mobility (along with all the other issues we’ve discussed) has caused deep anxiety among many people. The feeling that their hold on a middle class life is tenuous at best. Couple that with the increasing cost of education and people are rightly fearful about the future - worried their kids will not enjoy the same level of success they have. I think that is part of the reason there is such a frenzy over “elite” schools - for some people it appears that is one of the only sure avenues for their kids to succeed (that isn’t true, of course, but it is a persistent myth).
Well put. But also the rising standard of living (let’s pick pre-WW2 as our baseline) over several generations has now led many upper middle class parents to believe (also mistakenly) that a person can’t possibly “manage” with a median HH income living a perfectly fine middle class lifestyle.
My family members who are schoolteachers for example- find it hilarious that some of their friends (in much more renumerative professions) cannot fathom why they would encourage their own kids to become teachers, social workers, therapists, etc (if they want to go that way). “But how will they live?” is the unspoken question. And the idea that kids don’t need to grow up with their own bedroom and private bathroom, that every kid doesn’t need a car at age 16, or that mowing your own lawn is a sign of sociological decay…
From having been a Congressional staffer and working politics with local and other Congressional staffers over the last ten years. The role of a constituent-services staffer is much changed from what it once was. Again, structural changes in what the money does.
(Which is not to say that of the 535 staffs there aren’t some that still do heavy soc-services lifting. Roll the clock back, though, and you’d have found that to be the norm, even in low-ranking/non-urban offices. These days, though? Lotta constituent-facing staffers who don’t know nuffink, are heavily scripted, are looking for “their people”, and are much more part of national-level-directed election machinery than they used to be. I’ve even seen some turn out the lights well ahead of closing day and punt to the nearest county party hack.)
And the dueling anecdotes can both be true, but not necessarily applicable to all Congressional staffers.
As this thread and many others on these forums demonstrate, personal anecdotes are powerful influencers of opinions, and many people assume that their personal anecdotes are applicable universally or to a greater extent than they actually are. Even experiences that are common are not necessarily universal.
While @bennty 's posts tend to overclaim the futility treadmill problem that exists in much of today’s US society, it also looks as though many forum posters who are in the successful (“upper middle that does not get college financial aid”) class (whether from high SES family origins or striving sometimes-immigrant family origins) appear to deny that the futility treadmill problem even exists and is a lot more common than it appears from the vantage point of the successful class.
A steady job with a decent income seems like an entirely reasonable goal for a 40 year old, or for any age, for that matter. Not everyone aspires to society defining jobs.
From having been a Congressional staffer and working politics with local and other Congressional staffers over the last ten years. The role of a constituent-services staffer is much changed from what it once was. Again, structural changes in what the money does.