CDZ Who Wins The Argument?

[LoneLaugher]

This is an interesting discussion between a nutbag uncle and a pampered, entitled young person regarding the cost of higher education.

Read through it and tell us who you think had the better argument. I think it's clear.

Girl Finally Loses It When Her Conservative Uncle Posts This On FB, And Nails It.

 

[Toronado3800]

Um, so they were debating free vs affordable and joining the military?

Both had points. College is expensive.

 

[Skull Pilot]

It's an invalid comparison because in the 1970's we didn't have the "everyone needs to go to college" mindset. More people went onto the trades in the 70's than they do today. There were more vocational high schools and not everyone was forced onto the college track

This new attitude that everyone must go to college is what is responsible for the sky high tuition rates we see today so instead of going and has resulted in bullshit degrees in things like women's studies that are worthless in the job market.

So instead of going to college and wasting your time getting a stupid degree in a worthless major maybe you should learn a skill that can actually make you some money

 

[Divine Wind]

This is an interesting discussion between a nutbag uncle and a pampered, entitled young person regarding the cost of higher education.

Read through it and tell us who you think had the better argument. I think it's clear.

Girl Finally Loses It When Her Conservative Uncle Posts This On FB, And Nails It.

She makes a few valid points, but mostly she's just ranting, finger-pointing and playing the blame game.

It's not her uncle's fault that colleges make them pay $200 for a textbook then make it obsolete the following year negating any sellback potential.

It's not her uncle's fault that the LWers decided to make college more affordable by offering government-backed low-interest school loans (like they did with houses and Obamacare) thus resulting in colleges jacking the price up further burdening taxpayers.

This USA Today editorial covers the problems very well and explains why Bernie (then Hillary's) plans for "free college" won't work. Instead of racking up US debt with "free stuff", why not work to cut costs be it college or healthcare?

Making college more expensive: Our view
The United States prides itself on being innovative and creative. Yet it is struggling to train its next generation of achievers. Despite rapidly rising sums that the federal government has devoted to loans and grants, American college students and recent graduates are wallowing in debt. At last count, they owed $1.2 trillion.

Not surprisingly, the leading Democratic presidential candidates — Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley — have come up with plans they say will make colleges more affordable and provide debt relief for millennials. Though well-intentioned, their plans threaten to drive up costs rather than rein them in. They would all throw more federal money at colleges while offering little but hope that these institutions would hold expenses down.

If history is any guide, colleges and universities will channel much of the additional money into areas that don't directly benefit students. They might also hike tuition, telling students not to worry because taxpayers will pick up much of the additional burden. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York report found that colleges increased tuition 40 cents for every dollar received in Pell Grants, and 65 cents for every dollar in subsidized loans.

Clinton's plan is the least ambitious and the most practical. Yet it still amounts to taxpayers spending a lot more money without concrete efforts to make colleges control costs. Its centerpiece is a 10-year, $175 billion program of matching grants to states that would require states to reverse recent budget cuts. It would also allow students and graduates to refinance their debts at lower interest rates, expand programs that let people repay their loans as a percentage of their incomes, and enhance existing education tax credits.

She would pay for all this with higher taxes on wealthy Americans. While the affluent can and should pay more, this is a well that lawmakers can go to only so often. New revenue that goes to tuition assistance is money that can't be used to shore up Social Security or Medicare, expand the nation's infrastructure, or reduce the budget deficit.

Plans offered by Sanders and O'Malley would go even further, setting a goal of debt-free education for all students at all public universities.

A better idea would be to take a magnifying glass to exactly why college costs have skyrocketed at three times the overall inflation rate since 1980. As with health care, the answer involves what happens when bills are paid with other people's money.

Too many universities have become bloated and inefficient, using their revenue in ways that don’t benefit the students’ education: Million dollar salaries awarded to top-paid college presidents. Professors who barely teach. Sparkling recreation centers, such as the one at Louisiana State University complete with a lazy river. Bloated bureaucracies with endless vice presidents. Money-losing sports programs.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out where money could be saved, but persuading colleges to part with these extras won’t be easy. This is where the federal government and states can harness the leverage that accompanies their dollars to demand accountability, perhaps by awarding grants only to institutions that hold the line on tuition and fees.

Contrary to what many schools would tell you, such cost cutting isn't impossible. Purdue University in Indiana has frozen its tuition for two straight years and will continue to do so for at least two more. To be sure, some of this has been done with the budgetary gimmick of taking more out-of-state students, who pay much higher rates. Even so, Purdue's focus on cost containment should be followed by other schools.

Only by attacking rising tuition at its root cause will the problem of college affordability be addressed. The Democratic candidates need a little more educating on this.

 

[320 Years of History]

This is an interesting discussion between a nutbag uncle and a pampered, entitled young person regarding the cost of higher education.

Read through it and tell us who you think had the better argument. I think it's clear.

Girl Finally Loses It When Her Conservative Uncle Posts This On FB, And Nails It.

First off, why the woman (girl? -- taking the matter to Facebook strikes me as sophomoric, thus girlish (puerile) more so than womanly (mature)) felt the place to have the argument with her uncle was in open public and on Facebook is beyond me. I know had any of my kids or mentees done that, the quality of their argument would have become irrelevant if there were something of me they expected to receive as a result of their efforts/argument.

Taking the matter to Facebook, presumably to invoke the "court of public opinion's" input would have been a losing strategy from square one. Just as in my day, if one's elders were of a mind to entertain one's argumentative pleas, one knew better than to make them in public. One just didn't "show your ass" like that and think it'd get one somewhere good. What that girl did by taking the matter to FB is no different than throwing a tantrum in public 40 years ago. Donald Trump may do it, but that just makes him look childish; it doesn't make it look not childish when others do it.

With that out of the way...lemme read the rest of the conversation and see what I think of it...

Girl's points in advocating for a means to an "affordable"/"free" college education solution other than joining the military:

• Premises:
  • (Tacit) Enlisting in the military subjects one to:
  1. mental reconditioning
  2. physical reconditioning
  3. risk of life
  4. fighting in a war to which one morally objects
  • Education was affordable to the generation preceding hers. [I'm not sure how old this girl is, so I don't know what generation that is.]
  • Textbooks aren't actually needed.
  • In [recent] prior generations, most people could and did pay for college "out of pocket," taking no loans to attend a 4-year university/college.
  • Today, middle class folks cannot pay "out of pocket" to attend a 4-year university/college.
  • The government has raised interest rates on student loans and the rate increases have been exponential in comparison to what they were for the prior [two?] generations. (She cites the minimum current interest rate on student loans as being 4%.)
  • Average student graduates with $35K in student loan debt and 4% minimum interest.
  • It takes the average student (presumably paying off the average loan, 20 years to pay off their student debt.
  • Unemployment and Underemployment:
    • Unemployment rate among young recent graduates is 7%.
      • Therefore the employment must be 93%.
      • Of the 93%, 15% are underemployed.
      • Therefore 85% are not underemployed.
    • By her figures, (.93 x .85 = .79) 79% of recent undergrads are employed and not underemployed. [I'm going to call that "79% are fully employed."]
  • The housing crash was caused by the same government subsidy plan that drive the cost of college to what it is now.
• Conclusions and inferences:
  • One should not have to enlist to be able to afford a college education.
  • Politicians are the reason education is no longer affordable.
  • College tuition programs/policies applicable to her uncle's and a preceding generation caused schools to increase tuition faster than the inflation rate because the government was paying the tuition rather than individuals paying it. Same general concept applies to textbook prices.
  • 79% of recent graduates being fully employed is "abysmal."
  • Starting salaries for recent college graduates are low. (She doesn't
  • Prior generations were more "entitled" than is hers.

Uncle's Points in arguing that joining the military is a solution for obtaining "free" college education:

1. Join the military and one can get a free college education.
2. Political solutions (one's other than joining the military) to subsidize the cost of college "issue" will require one to yield 35% of one's paycheck to subsidize everyone else's college education.

Okay, so having broken down both individual's arguments, what was I supposed to address? The remark below, correct?

Read through it and tell us who you think had the better argument. I think it's clear.

Well, as goes whose argument is better, they both have incredibly lame arguments. Thinking back to when I was a collegiate English composition instructor and the argumentative essay assignments I gave my students, I can tell you that the uncle would have received an "F," and the girl a "D-," from me. Here's why:

• Merit of the remarks as an argument:
  From this perspective, the girl presented the better argument, solely because she actually presented elements of an argument. Her argument is neither sound nor valid nor complete, but it is an argument of sorts.
  
  The girl's argument doesn't at all discuss what she should have been addressing; she's completely off point. She should have presented an argument for why/how the solution she was given -- joining the military -- is inappropriate, unacceptable, won't work for some share of the population, why it's morally/ethically wrong, etc. The closest she came to presenting such an argument was to offer what (given what she actually wrote) might have been a thesis statement, or more accurately a statement that could have been part of a larger thesis idea, for the argument she should have been making.
  
  Rather than make the argument she should have, what did was present a terribly weak argument that does little other than identify a number of things that she believes to be true -- some of them simply aren't true or not often enough true that they matter -- and what she thinks about the situations/circumstances she's observed, or thinks she's observed/discovered. There's a term for that: demagoguery. That may seem like an argument, but it's not one at all even though it contains elements of an argument.
  
  Lastly, she doesn't actually present a conclusion for the argument she was in the process of making. That's something she absolutely needed to do because an argument without a conclusion is not an argument. Her argument, being "off point," cannot even avail itself of an inferred conclusion derived by taking the opposite of her uncle's opening statement. She's got several intermediate conclusions (inferences), but no final conclusion for the argument she undertook to make, which means she doesn't really have an argument; she just has some of the makings of one.
  
  The uncle also didn't actually present an argument. All the did was make unsubstantiated statements and had none of the structure of an argument:
  • identify a solution for getting an affordable/free college education,
  • claim that "free" isn't without cost sooner or later
  • identify, without substantiation, what that cost would be as a percentage of one's future earnings that one would not have use of.

One must answer the question one is asked, and in this thread, the OP asks us to identify who has the better argument. Incredibly lame as it is, the girl at least has elements of an argument and she's structured her remarks in the form of an argument. The uncle has simply pontificated, and that's not making an argument.

 

[Toronado3800]

I should have added earlier, there is a third option.

My sorry self got a 4 year degree over the course of 8 or 10 years.

During that time my life was great. Them 10 years spanned 3 jobs. My terrible fast food manager job, I generally ran a tow truck company's evening operations then had a weird police/security/emergency response gig for a Class 1 Railroad (and ended up running the office under humorous/terrible circumstances when everyone else was relocating, but that was after I graduated)

It was also great socially. My mother and grandmother let me live at home for the first several years, then I shared a townhouse with the boys.

How does this affect the argument? The old man should have answered. "I'll help where I can. Get a job and take 2 or 3 classes this semester, there is no need to go in debt."

Working at it that way I: had fun, made money, lived on my own, got a degree, and by the time I graduated I had a career worthy job with a Fortune 500 company.

 

[Divine Wind]

I should have added earlier, there is a third option.

My sorry self got a 4 year degree over the course of 8 or 10 years.

During that time my life was great. Them 10 years spanned 3 jobs. My terrible fast food manager job, I generally ran a tow truck company's evening operations then had a weird police/security/emergency response gig for a Class 1 Railroad (and ended up running the office under humorous/terrible circumstances when everyone else was relocating, but that was after I graduated)

It was also great socially. My mother and grandmother let me live at home for the first several years, then I shared a townhouse with the boys.

How does this affect the argument? The old man should have answered. "I'll help where I can. Get a job and take 2 or 3 classes this semester, there is no need to go in debt."

Working at it that way I: had fun, made money, lived on my own, got a degree, and by the time I graduated I had a career worthy job with a Fortune 500 company.

I grew up in a time when those low-cost loans weren't as easily available. Sure the price of college was cheaper, but still a bit out of reach. I lived at home and attended community college for the first two years, then obtained a small loan, worked and attended a university away from home (but in-state) for the last two years.

Nowadays, kids expect to go to the school of their choice all four years but on someone elses dime.

 

[GaryDog]

It's an invalid comparison because in the 1970's we didn't have the "everyone needs to go to college" mindset. More people went onto the trades in the 70's than they do today. There were more vocational high schools and not everyone was forced onto the college track

This new attitude that everyone must go to college is what is responsible for the sky high tuition rates we see today so instead of going and has resulted in bullshit degrees in things like women's studies that are worthless in the job market.

So instead of going to college and wasting your time getting a stupid degree in a worthless major maybe you should learn a skill that can actually make you some money

I don't think there's any one thing responsible for tuition rates exploding, but definitely one of the major reasons isn't the "we need to go to college" attitude, but rather the excessively luxurious dorms/amenities at universities for college kids these days.

My college room had mold. I had to bring in my own roll of carpet. Paint it. It was 8 x 10. Glorified jail cell that I was allowed to leave.

Now they have pools, saunas, spas, and Marriott hotels for dorms. The gyms are state of the art.

If we had stuck to the TRUE college experience we had just 17-18 years ago, when I attended, it wouldn't be nearly as expensive.