Real Diversity Issue

No doubt there has been racial discrimination in our US history (of course throughout the world).

IMHO though the more immediate issue and way to make better progress is to focus on color blind economic diversity. If we as a country can work towards more economic equality, then racial equality will follow. I’m not pointing to pure communism, I’m proposing that we pay better attention to the problems of those less fortunate and strive to treat them better.

Others will disagree but I believe we can find more common ground if we focus on economic disparity rather race. I hope this makes sense.

 

And that ties into other big issues like the Opioid Crisis and drug trafficking.

People can make more money dealing in an afternoon than in a week or two of working a $15/hr job.

And that leads into crime, homicide, and problems with policing and the criminal justice system.

It’s all intertwined.

And sadly fucked up.

 

I agree and I'll start with my No. 1 solution: The federal government should stop guaranteeing student loans. Dismantle FAFSA. I mean it. No, not everybody should go to college because not everybody needs to, and, not only that, there are millions of jobs requiring college degrees that absolutely should not. We have a skill/trade worker shortage in many places for this very reason: Americans have the fallacy that attending college makes you a better, more well-rounded person.

It does not. Maybe at one time it did. Not now.

If the federal government pulled out, costs would drop dramatically at many schools. Pointlessly expensive buildings that serve no educational function would cease to be built. Dorm rooms would no longer be palaces, either. Further, companies that give loans wouldn't give shit loans to bad students who've shown a proclivity of dropping out. This would be a good thing.

Mediocre students who are also poor or even middle class should not go to college. At least, not to a four-year college that squeezes them dry. And once the expectation that everyone goes to college disappears, not going to college won't have the same yucky reputation. This is also a good thing.

The majority of poor and lower-middle class people should stop trying to live like upper-middle class people. It starts there. Really. When we stop acting like there's one kind of acceptable dream to which to aspire is when the scales start to adjust.

 

I have a problem with the US spending more money on healthcare for lesser outcomes than countries with universal care.
I have a problem with CEO pay going through the roof while average worker wages have stagnated while productivity increased.
The money is still being made, it's just not going into wages anymore.

 

In the last year I've started doing something truly radical with a few younger people in my church: I've started to ask "how do you afford that?" You want to talk about an uncomfortable moment. And it's not preachy, either, because, in some cases, mostly because of their parents, they have more access to long-term cash than I will.

But one thing I've found is the answers tend to divide into three categories:

*I can't really.

*Well, I'm working multiple jobs and people don't know that.

*Well, my parents.

Ex: A late 20s guy went to Europe for a month after getting out of grad school. His parents paid for that. And once someone says that out loud, and hears back "Wow, that's really nice of your parents" it altered, perhaps only slightly, how the experience is recounted. But it's altered nonetheless - in a good way.

Point being: You can start changing things by asking that one question. With any generation.

 

I largely agree, but the problem is the culture of this country is so anti-intellectual that if you sre born into a lower middle classs family in the midwest to get the sort of intellectual exposure I feel is necessary to a well-rounded life, you have to go to college. There’s no reason this should be the case. You shouldn’t have to be $100,000 in debt to be introduced to philosophy and art and the sort of thinking that leads to a well-adjusted life. But this is the culture and society we built out of puritanical incuriosity.

We taught everday Americans that being smart made you out of touch, elitist. We taught boys that being well-rounded was emasculating and that a girl being smart was a waste of time. And we perpetuated it for hundreds of years.

And now we’re at a place where a guy like me, born to auto workers in a tiny Midwest town, had to flee to find a place where I wasn’t an oddity for wearing out a library card, wanting to see a challenging art film or daring to push against orthodoxy.

We limited the regular man to a fast food, low brow scared little life and told him the only way out was a university where his dangerous, snooty, heretical thoughts were kept from spreading. Or pick up a gun and risk his life overseas for the opportunity to get out. Or, in its sad apotheosis, just watch better lives play out on TV and a computer screen and live vicariously through those people.

And there’s no way out. Dumb has triumphed. And we limited knowledge and wisdom to campuses, where it has mutated into something ugly, as you’ve often aptly pointed out.

 

Pretty much sums my thoughts. I’ve felt this way since not long after college, which didn’t benefit me nearly as much as I had been told it would.

I actually thought about not going to college, and instead going to a trade school, because my family didn’t have much money and I feared the debt I’d have to pay over the ensuing years wouldn’t be worth it. Years later, still saddled with an absurd amount of student debt, I wish I hadn’t let people convince me otherwise.

 

Could you expand on that? What do you mean by "color blind economic diversity"?

 

I want to agree with you.

Except those trade jobs you want people to work are going to be low paying, no vacation, no health insurance, no 401k ....

So how do we fix that?

 

Not necessarily.

Plenty of master plumbers and electricians and HVAC contractors who make six figures. Especially if they start their own business.

There's an apprenticeship period certainly, and whatever competition in their area at the journeyman level, but there's always opportunity for folks like that.

Same in the allied health fields these days. Nurses, techs, etc.

Most of which can be studied for at a trade school, without sinking 100K + into a liberal arts education.

 

That said, I'd like to see those folks get a broad education in the humanities as well - to the extent possible.

The idea of the Jeffersonian yeoman behind the plow reading his Catullus or Erasmus is appealing, but just as unlikely now as it was then.

And I disagree vigorously with the idea that somehow higher education no longer produces good citizens or good thinkers. Education produces those things in roughly the same proportions it always has.

 

All guaranteeing loans has done is bloat tuition, help touch off a mad rush of building living quarters that have little to do with education, and bloat administrations with Vice chancellors and coordinators and student affairs types. The education itself has become secondary to the idea of: How do we keep these mediocre students in college so we can keep getting their federal money?

Now, mind you, rich mediocre students will always be there. Always. But they’re using their own money, or their parents’ money. But middle class B- students with minimum ACTs certainly can get in college - with the federal government’s help - but I don’t think it helps them much to be there.