There's something about high-achieving women that seems to paint a picture in people's head of unfriendly, cold, hard-to-work-with...
Which is funny because the only complaint I had about my female classmates who worked their ass off to get As was that they weren't ever really interested in discussing the topics of the class. They liked to do the work and get out, but tbh that's true among all the high achievers I've met. "It's just a grade we can just do the stuff to get the grade and then we'll have the grade and then the degree" is, to me, the actual most boring way to approach school ever.
A lot of what, for example, my engineer friends do in their day-to-day job is stuff they learned literally on the job and the opportunity to get a couple of certificates would have served them far better than actually attending a university. The only aspects of the university experience I think genuinely mattered for most of my friends was access to resources for projects and occasionally being forced to do those projects.
I'm enjoying my experience here at UCSB mostly, but it's still very frustrating to be surrounded by people who are more interested in the grade than what's actually going on. On the other hand, a big part of my quantum mechanics class is "so if you apply this technique you get this differential equation. The solutions are found on this table here." Like, cool! Finally!
One of these days I'm going to just completely revamp the educational system. Just a few things I'd like to change:
1- Techniques should be learned in the course of answering questions. Example: arithmetic shouldn't be taught as "math," but rather as the solution to problems like "if I want to buy a toy that costs $15 and I can make $1.50 per mowed lawn, how many lawns do I have to mow?" If you do it that way you can probably get a group of kids to learn how multiplication works in a couple of months at most.
2- There should be more emphasis on integrating the subjects. No stand-alone art classes. If you want to teach artists how to do, say, arithmetic, let them do a project where they "draw" the multiplication tables or something like that. If the kids don't want to do art, and would rather do something else, who $#@!ing cares.
3- Middle school should be abolished and replaced with a much more loosely structured system. Puberty is hardcore ass. Letting people spend time reading books in the library for a couple of years or play around in the woodshop or whatever isn't going to put them significantly behind in their education. Let it just be a couple year break from a formal school structure. I don't know what I would want this to look like yet.
4- Give high schoolers much more say in what they study, and integrate the $#@!in' subjects. Diversify the offerings. If I want to work on cars, then there's a) math I need to know, b) history that's going to be interesting to me, c) engineering and scientific concepts that are important, and d) it'll be good (and fun) for me to communicate about that. So try to build high school in such a way that if what I really want to do is autoshop then my English course is me writing about cars, my History course is me studying about cars, and my math class is me learning how to do the math necessary to cars. Leverage that into teaching me how these different subjects work, and try to bring a little more of that intersectional goodness out of it, i.e. "cars have always been a status symbol but the Model-T and later the events of the 1950s lowered the price of access to cars which lead to" blah blah blah.
We also need to change the way teachers pay works. I'm thinking something like $50-60k a year to start with a master's degree equivalent from a normal school. To mitigate the costs of living, I'd like to see the government (for public schools, private schools can do whatever the $#@! they want because they're just busy charging rich people out the nose... seriously they charge $15k/yr/student for Jesuit, 150% what the government spends on students... but the government is "inefficient" right?
) put in programs of guaranteed loans, etc. for teachers. Things like the government matching down payments on houses for tenured teachers, paying student debt for teachers...Could you imagine how much easier it would be to be a public school teacher if you made a little more, the down payment on your house was matched by the government (10% of a $400,000 home is $40k which is not unreasonable savings at $50k a year for about 5 years. A 2 bedroom at $2000/month is $24000 a year, between the $15000 20-hour-week-minimum-wage and the $50k/year teacher salary, which comes down to a total household pre-tax income of $65000 for a married couple, about $49,000 net pay, take of $24000 a year for housing, that leaves you with $25000 a year, earmark $8k of that a year and you still have $17k a year to move around for things like a car, food, etc. and in 5 years you have your down payment)? And if you're single it's even easier: you can get a smaller house, you're only responsible for half the housing costs...
It seems expensive, right? But seriously, the numbers work out very nicely. The median teacher salary is $60k currently, with the median teacher having worked for 14 years. That's a total compensation of $840,000 and bumping that up to $880,000 is just a 5% raise. FIVE PERCENT! That's like the typical merit raise?! But it comes in a form that's immediately useful to a new teacher and creates a situation that (hopefully) convinces them to put roots in a community. As for credentialing programs, the idea that the State of California doesn't have a program by which you agree to work N years as a public school teacher (call it 15) in exchange for us covering the cost of your CSU normal school education and we guarantee you a job somewhere (you might not like where) is frankly ridiculous. If it works for the US military, I cannot imagine why it wouldn't work for other sectors. We could be funding the creation of a generation of public servants who enter mid-paying jobs (like social worker, public school teacher) simply by agreeing to subsidize their education?
Of course, this all assumes we won't go to "utterly free to user education" which... is its own thing btw. When I crunch the numbers on that it really pisses me off, actually.
Seriously [url=https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/researc ... nings.html]the data shows that we're just investing.[/i] It's just an investment. The average person will earn more than $600,000 over the course of their lifetime simply by going to university. Over a career from age 20-70 (so 50 year career), the mean high school graduate will make $900,000, the mean university graduate will make $1.5 million. The high school graduate averages to about $18k a year (this number needs to rise, FYI) and the university graduate makes $30k a year (this number too is absurdly low) on average over the course of their 50 year career. The HS grad pays ~$2k a year in taxes, the college grad pays ~$5.
Quick. $3k * 50 = $150,000, right? $35k (average tuitition/fees for private college) * 4 = $140,000. Last time I checked, $150,000-$140,000 = $10,000, which means that just from the very nature of providing that education the government will, using the current tax rates, on average make $10k per student it sends to college. Yet you have all these $#@!ing Elzams going "BUT FREE COLLEGE IS BLAH BLAH BLAH." I feel like having the government "behave like a business" (i.e. making long-term investments, not whatever profit-driven bull@#(! the Metz' think it means) genuinely means "free college for all, incentives to go into post-grad programs with financial incentives to then use that expertise to work for the government."
The question of course then becomes, where do we pay for all of this? Well, my friends, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez' tax plan isn't even necessary here. 51 million students in US public schools, plus 15 million in university students. Trimming the US military budget from its FY 2019 $718 billion budget to, say, the $518 spent by China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK and Japan would free up $200 billion. What does this pay for?
The average cost of tuition and fees for US public schools currently stands at $10,000 a year. 1.5*10^6 students times $10^5 is 1.5*10^11, or $150 billion per year. As has been previously demonstrated, the sum of the average expected rate of return on this investment is approximately $10,000 per student, so $2500 per student per year of 4 year university, or $2.5*10^4 * 1.5*10^6 = $25*10^10. An investment of $150 billion gives us $25 billion for a rate of return of 1.7%. Not exciting, to be sure, but I can't imagine investment in bombs is doing us much better.
Tl/dr:
all of the plans that "liberals" want that are "expensive" are actually net-revenue generating, and even if they were not, are probably more efficient RoI for the government than most of the other bull@#(! that the government spends money on leading to longer-term savings simply by moving money around inside the budget away from things like the military or random concrete walls metal fences no seriously it's a wall but it's made of steel slats like a fence whatever the $#@! the Cheeto in Chief is talking about.
