Hildegarde

And not very coherent.

First, Mike–college loans may be a Republican plot, but the situation that got us there was squarely a project of Democrats. 

It was liberals, not conservatives, who wanted “everybody” to graduate from high school, and liberals–and liberaly theory–that responded to the fact that not everybody was doing that (and some minorities were not doing it in higher percentages than whites) by dumbing down standards to make the “goal” possible.

If high school graduation standards were now what they were in 1950, we wouldn’t need to be having a discussion about college loans.  Most people would not go to college, but they would reach the same skill levels most of them do now by going to high school with no out of pocket expense.

Employers would not need a college degree to have of hope of getting somebody literate, since a high school diploma would already guarantee that.

And since people would graduate from high school at the same rates they now graduate from “college,” there would not be a tidal wave of high school “graduates” to weed through when trying to fill a position.

I really, really, really don’t want the federal government paying for college, and I don’t much want the state governments to do it either, except for the state university systems. 

Centralization means standardization.   He who pays the piper calls the tune.

And I want lots of alternatives to the present state of university “education” in the US, because it is not, by and large, education.

Second, Robert–alas, you’re a good two decades out of date on college fees.

Tuition, room and board  for the University of Connecticut this year comes to $21,198. 

Granted, that’s better than a private college, but it’s still not low enough to make it possible for most people to work their way through the way they did in my father’s time.

Of course, you could reduce your costs even further, by doing two years at a community college and then two at one of the lower level state university campuses, like Wesconn or Southern.

The problems with this are two fold.

First, employers and graduate and professional schools tend to read community college as “so bad in high school he couldn’t get in anywhere else.”

And second, the fields you can “major” in are limited, and largely restricted to the vocational.  If you want an academic degree, you’re largely out of luck.  But even if you want something more substantive than “business administration” on any level, you’re largely out of luck.

If you want teaching or nursing, though, you’re golden.

The third thing has to do with something completely off the wall, but I couldn’t help noticing it.

Charlie Sheen seems to be going completely nuts, but on one level I sympathize with his rants.

I don’t know how Alcoholics Anonymous and 12 Step Programs because “accepted science” and people who specialize in them became “addiction specialists,” but when you’ve got “doctors” who fail to fix 95% of all the patients they “treat”–a number, by the way, that represents exactly the percentage of people who kick their addictions with no help at all–I think it’s breathtaking we call them experts in anything.

And now, I’m likely to be off the blog for a day or two. 

I just got a phone call from my mother’s nursing home, and she died at 3:45 this morning.

I’ll talk to everybody when I can breathe again.