The High Cost of Higher Education

There seems to be a growing trend to allow workers into career paths without college. In St. Louis, there is a program called Launchcode that offers anyone with self taught computer programming experience the chance to work in a paired programming environment that could ultimately result in a full time job. There are no education requirements, just a skill requirement.  This idea is beyond just St. Louis. I recently read an article about a recruiter that is trying to find those special unique individuals to join the top tier companies such as Facebook and Google so that they are not limiting their recruitment to the MIT or Stanford grads. They want diversity and that can be about where you did or did not go to school. A select few are able to get into those programs and even with scholarships, extremely expensive universities can be out of reach for many. While those colleges are outliers on the cost scale, even many top tier state universities will now leave a four year graduate with a mountain of debt. I know a java programmer that recently joined a company in St. Louis who attended a middle tier school that cost his parents $35,000 per year. Yes, he is now making around $60,000 but he is only coming out ahead because the college education was a gift from his family. Fewer families can now give that kind of gift.

The same thing is happening in the food industry with a return to the old school apprenticeship model in lieu of high priced culinary schools. It is called staging and allows a budding chef to work in different aspects of the kitchen for no money but also at no cost. In some top tier European kitchens, the opportunity to stage could even come with room and board so the only cost is transportation. This can provide a much less expensive learning opportunity.

This concept may never catch on in the medical field or law, occupations where credentials hold much more value and are an integral part of those career paths. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds as the cost of higher education has become so prohibitively high and colleges seem more interested in their athletic programs, buying land and expansion than they do on providing an education for all. We need to find lots of creative ways to solve this challenge. Education is still the key to our future but can’t it come at a more reasonable price.

When it isn't OK to express opinions?

When those opinions endanger lives.

I have tried to avoid the Duck Dynasty controversy because I don't like to bring attention to ideas that I believe are harmful and divisive. But finally, I had to put down my thoughts. The stakes are too high. 

Here is the problem. Straight, supposedly religious people have gay kids. It is unfortunate but it is just the way it is. And I know, believing that we are born gay is not universally accepted in the way that the Big Bang or evolution is not universally accepted. But it is true and a fact of nature.

Most kids know they are gay when they are still too young to leave home and thus, lives are endangered by those opinions. Growing up with a parent who will tell you that you can change or that who you are is intrinsically evil, is in fact a form of child abuse. And that is that.  Gay kids kill themselves because of this and it is a form of parental bullying and that is that.

In this country, those kids, if they survive childhood can grow up and live happy, healthy lives after they work through their parent issues. But in other parts of the world, this idea and message continues to spread in large part with the help of so called Christian evangelicals. Take a close look at Africa and you see that this is a message that is endangering lives. So while you spout off your opinions, you have a role in the torture and abuse of innocent gay people all over the world. When do those opinions become the same thing as crying fire in a crowded theater?

Accountability and Government spending

I was reading an article in Newsweek about private for profit companies that do contract work for the U. S. Government. I think that the topic especially resonated in light of the failure of the IT team that built the Affordable Care web site. The gist of the article was that while non-profits are held to a high standard by the government, profit based companies often are not.

The article referred to this government site and suggested taking the data on here with a grain of salt-USA Spending Government Site

And here is another interesting government site  Payment Accuracy

Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

Walter Mosley's 2011 book, "Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation" is based on the 12 step program for addicts and really compares our lack of political awareness around our role to that of an addict. He explains how we are manipulated to believe many falsehoods by the power brokers of our current economic system. His term for the wealthy is to call them the "joes" in an effort to point out how they are really just ordinary human beings who have somehow managed to control our system to which we all play our proscribed roles.

Step One is simply admitting there is a problem and then defining that problem. I think we can all agree that there is a problem. 

Step Two is learning how to speak to the problem. I think that is a huge step because we are manipulated by the words that are thrown around, terms like socialism or welfare. Mosley uses this chapter to point to our failed educational system as one of the reasons we cannot have a common language to discuss big ideas. 

Step Three is telling the truth and he advocates that many of us lie to ourselves out of fear. When we see a truth but are afraid to speak out, we should write it down. Perhaps sometime in the future, we can work our way to speaking the truth. I found this chapter compelling and tried to think of an example that I could call out. One of the lies I think is that we have come to believe is that government cannot do a good job of anything. While government is not perfect, neither are profit based corporations.  

Step Four is Defining the Classes and this goes back to the truth telling. Can you really say where you fit in. He makes the point and I agree that if you live paycheck to paycheck, no matter to what scale, you are not really solid middle class. You are one bad thing away from being poor, a job loss, a sickness, etc.

Step Five is about using psychotherapy in political development and the ideas are a tad esoteric. 

Step Six is about practicing this truth telling, questioning, and re-evaluation every day. It is like any new habit, you have to do it regularly or it never catches.

Steps Seven and Eight are about becoming better citizens 

Step Nine is about not  living in the past and is one of my personal favorites. 

Step Ten is truth telling around really understanding cost and the true value of things. 

This leads to Step Eleven which is understanding your own true worth. 

Step Twelve is the coming together of minds to become greater than anyone of us. The sum is greater than its parts.

I think the idea of examining the things we are told is key. We know we have to do that in our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living. But we have to do that politically and economically as well. Who knows where it all might lead?

The Christmas Season

With the holiday season upon us, I was thinking about f how conservatives and the religious right try to claim that the country, patriotism, religion, marriage, or even holidays fall within their own purview.   They have done that with the Founding of the US, turning Jefferson and Franklin into religious zealots that they never were. 

We see the fights at city halls around the country over displaying Nativity Scenes.

It was a Republican presidency that pushed the idea that it was our patriotic duty to shop in order to restore the 2008 collapsing economy. And that idea was never truer than at Christmas time.  So I asked myself, what does Christmas mean really? is it too commercial, is it strictly a religious holiday or culturally does is now encompass so much more?

Christmas Customs

According to this website, we don’t really know why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th but it definitely looks like it has some relationship to earlier celebrations of the Winter Solstice. Before there were Christmas carols, there were pagan carols sung around the Winter Solstice. Ironically, the Puritans in England and then later after they emigrated to the US were very much against the singing of Christmas carols. They actually attempted to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.  This trend surfaced several time in the US and it was not really until the 19 century that Christmas was taken in by more conservative Christian groups that were spawned by the Puritans.

So as with all things, the history is much less cut and dry. Perspectives change. Institution change and what is conservative now would have been radical once. We can all define what Christmas means to us and none of us have to be right or wrong.

Third World America

Arianna Huffington makes many of the points in her book, "Third World America" that I found in Barbara Garson's book, "Down the Up Escalator".  Huffington shares statistics and examples of many middle class Americans that met their demise not only from the economic downturn of 2008 but even before. Her fear, which is a consistent theme, is that there will someday soon be only those who belong in one extreme or the other. 

Defining the middle class statistically is difficult but you know it when you see it. She gave some income ranges but I felt that the low end of 45,000 per year for a household is pretty darn low if that income has to support several children and a mortgage in a location with high property values. On the other hand, if a couple is retired with a paid for home, then that can become a comfortable income. 

She points to the obvious culprits. Washington is completely broken and controlled exclusively by Wall Street and high priced lobbyist who speak for corporations and not people. While President Obama has at least tried some things to help, his successes are limited and approaches are timid. She points to the recovery act as a positive idea but because the substance was put together by politicians who are bought and paid for, it was not able to do what the WPA did during the Great Depression. 

She spends a great deal of time on the "Too Big to Fail" banks and what an obvious scam it was to bail them out. If they were in fact too big to fail, then they were too big. And why has there been no meaningful reform? Well again, we know the answer to that. You can hardly call it capitalism when corporations take no risk for loss but pocket all the profits. 

What does Arianna Huffington, publisher of the The Huffington Post suggest we can do to turn things around? A lot of her ideas are not political and fall into the realm of what we can all do as human beings to help our fellow citizens that are suffering. She also suggests we boycott the big banks and keep our money in local small banks or credit unions. This is an idea that I love and fully support. She does suggest that we absolutely must have vast, meaningful campaign finance reform. Without it, we will never be able to look to government to do the right thing. And without a government working for the best interest of the people, it is really hard to imagine that anything will ever change. 

The Digital Age is upon us

I want to showcase three writers whose work intersects with this content and helps us think   differently. The common theme within all their writing is the presumption that the economic framework, morality, and organizations of our world are not scaling well to a new digital age.

Eli Pariser is the chief executive of Upworthy. He was also on the board of MoveOn.Org.  In his book, the Filter Bubble,  he examines how the internet is filtering out what we want to see and what we don’t want to see.  That is concerning as allows many of us to filter out views that are counter to our own. This can be very dangerous in a democracy.

Then there is Don Tapscott, who wrote, “Grown up Digital” and “Macrowikinomics”

Tapscott suggests that we really need to develop new frameworks and paradigms.

Here is a quote from a Forbes interview that he gave, “In one sense, the Internet is like the discovery of the printing press, only it’s very different. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access not just to knowledge but to the intelligence contained in people’s crania, access to the intelligence of people on a global basis. This is not an information age. It’s an age of communication, of collective intelligence, of major collaboration, of major participation.”

And finally, Michael Sandel is a a writer for Atlantic and his book "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets," is an examination of how market based thinking so completely dominates that we assume we can “buy anything”. But we all know that you can’t buy love.  You can however, pay someone to stand in line for you and sell advertising space on your body if you live in Japan.  In the "Case Against Perfection," he continues this line of thought by pointing out that our morality is not evolving at the same pace as our technology.