Hiked
Looks like my daughter is gonna get out of UCLA this summer just in time so we can avoid yet one more fee tuition increase.
Since she began college in late 2001, the tuition in the UC system will have climbed a staggering 92%. By the time you add books, parking and incidentals, this public university now runs more than $10,000 a year — that’s not counting living expenses.
The idea that California has a first-notch public university system easily accessible to its population long passed into mythology. The refusal of the state to sufficiently fund the system and to sufficiently expand it has turned UC into a semi-private, elite set of schools out of the reach most students.
When I was a youngin’ –back in the late 60′s — you could get into a UC school with a 3.2 average and a few hundred bucks. Now you need a 4.0 and a wad of cash. And if you’re black, well, UCLA did enroll a few dozen of you last year.
My new blogdaughter (as opposed to the real daughter who has the AmEx card) Celeste Fremon at Witnessla.com has much more today on Unequal Education. The problem is hardly restricted to California.
March 15th, 2007 at 11:20 am
We just started to seriously look at colleges with our daughter. The price is daunting to say the least. I always wonder why the cost increases so rapidly year to year. Has California cut funding, or had the cost to maintain the University increased so dramatically? As for GPA requirements, seems reasonable for a college that can only handle a certain number of students, to take the best available.
March 15th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Before Reagan became governor you could go from kindergarten to PhD. for free.
March 15th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Really? So 40 years ago getting a PhD was free. I can’t even imagine the taxes required to support such a thing today.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Rufus: Before Reagan became governor you could go from kindergarten to PhD. for free.
For free?! For free?!!!! Typical liberal…thinking that no one has to pay for “free” government services.
—–
Back when Marc was a youngin’, colleges were filled with young men who had no business going to college except to avoid the draft by having their 2-S student deferments and to take part in protests.
As far as blacks going to UCLA, I saw their basketball team the other day and it sure looks like blacks are well represented at the school.
March 15th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
For free?! For free?!!!! Typical liberal…thinking that no one has to pay for “free†government services.
Allow me to clarify for the jackasses of the world:
You could attend without paying a penny of tuition.
March 15th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I commented over there how lucky I was to have gone to college in the sixties and seventies when it was so cheap and accessable that UCLA was my “Safety School.”
Woody That was called an “investment” and that’s how Pat Brown sold it and rightly so. The California Master Plan, along with the Freeway System (also becomming a thing of the past with “Private” toll roads now the answer) and the State Water Project, built modern California. But the cornerstone was education K – Ph.D. Maybe you think there’s something in the water out here that gave us “Silicon Valley” or the leadership in biotech. Maybe it was just an accident of geography that fully HALF of all Defense procurement dollars were spent in California. Pretty remarkable, when you think that in that period the appropriations committees were stacked with congressmen from the old South. They lavished their region with bases, depots, airfields, you name it. But the equipment that went on those bases was largely made in California because they needed people who could read to make it. And I suppose when Arnold or other Cal Politicos talk of us being the sixth or seventh largest economy in the world its all do to those awful pix he used to make.
I think Georgia gets that now as Zell Miller, when not foaming at the mouth, passed the opportunity scholarship act there guaranteeing anyone who qualified a college education. So I guess they are not all retarded down in “Gone with the Wind Land” whether you like it or not.
March 15th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
I think Georgia gets that now as Zell Miller, when not foaming at the mouth, passed the opportunity scholarship act there guaranteeing anyone who qualified a college education.
RLC,
And I might add they had to fund it by creating a state lottery, i.e. gambling.
I also graduated from a California State University, San Francisco State University. Apparently my education was sufficient that I could easily disprove Woody’s claims regarding Clinton and the firing of US attorneys.
Look forward tio seeing your science show on Educational Television someday, Woodrow.
March 15th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
In 1965 I got into UCLA with a 3.0 grade point average which was the cutoff at that time, and no SAT scores required. The tuition was 120 dollars per quarter. Things have changed indeed.
March 15th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Apparently your education, Rancid, was not sufficient to disprove my claims. (Are you still envious that I had a science show on ETV?)
The Georgia college plan only lets kids who maintain B averages keep scholarships, and that is funded by a tax on the mathematical challenged through the lottery. It’s been often stated that the blacks (who overwhelming play the lottery) are putting white middle-class kids through college. I opposed the lottery and have never played it to this day.
College educations are not “investments” to our future with the professors they have, like Ward Churchill, and with studies in feminism, blackness, Queer Musicology, Marxism, Lesbian Pulp Fiction, and, for a prick like Randy, this course:
This course at Occidental College covers a broad study on the relation “between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism.†That’s money down a rat hole.
March 15th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Woodrow HALF of the engineers in California are graduates of the CSU system. The techs that do the scutwork in Silicon Valley are grads of the Community College System.When you know something about higher education please post.
Oh, and Occidental College is a Private Institution and “Highly Selective” according to US News.
March 15th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
rlc, I’ve had more higher education than most people here. The only difference is that I didn’t waste time with uselss classes. Would you like to learn more about studies in blackness,whitness, gayness, and radical feminism at your California schools? BTW, your statistic is just meaningless.
March 15th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Woody is reciting David Horowitz nonsense, which as persusual with conspiracy theories has a kernel of truth…
While its true that identity oriented courses are somewhat overboard sometimes- not to mention the odious discipline of cultural studies (ie. derardicalizing radical theory in order to ascertain the hermeneutics of Avril Lavigne) it is no more overboard than much of the nonsense taught in business schools. I can say that “The life of the mind” as it were, is an important aspect of human reality, and if people want to navel gaze either right or left, it is one of the cgreat things about hte USA, its diverse education system. The capitalist “Choice” principle works well in education.
Regardless of what Woody thinks I hope he isn’t suggesting a Horowitzian solution.
Marx is one of the most important philosophers of the last 500 years, so it is obvious that courses will be dedicated to Marxism. As someone doing postgraduae studies having to do with Marxism, among other thingse, I take offense that you think Marxism is not something that should be taught. I hate John Locke, but I’m not gonna go around complaining about courses that teach him, even though for my money he’s far less important than the old mole.
March 15th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Woody is reciting David Horowitz nonsense, which as persusual with conspiracy theories has a kernel of truth…
And still feels a need to call people puerile names like rancid.
March 15th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
j, really quick. The Marxism courses I saw were something along the line of “Marxism – Should it have another chance?” If I want that question answered honestly, I sure wouldn’t depend on most college professors.
On the opposite side, western civilization courses and courses on the Bible were tossed out long ago, and they have greater value than one on a failed economic system.
BTW, I don’t read Horowitz and don’t know what solution he proposes. Maybe we should do like Bill Clinton did with the U.S. attorneys and fire all of them at one time and be careful whom we re-hire.
March 15th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I mean fire all of the professors. My bad.
March 15th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
rlc, I’ve had more higher education than most people here.
Really? From what you post here, I can’t tell.
March 15th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Western civilization courses and courses on the bible were thrown out?
Where? What the hell are you talking about?
March 15th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
And there is no “honest” answer to “Marxism, should it have another chance?” because that is a matter of discussion and interpretation. Its too soon to tell. No one – especially on Wall Street! – will deny that Capital is one of the most important works of economics ever written.
March 15th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
With massive grade inflation, what is a 4.0 today?
March 15th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
With massive grade inflation a 4.0 ain’t what it used to be, for sure. But it’s more than enough to bar about 90% of California students from even thinking about applying to the UC system.
By way of disclosure: I was academically fast-tracked through school (having skipped a year of grade school) but to no avail. Refusing to ever do any homework (that I can recall) I graduated in 1968. a month after I turned 17, with about a 3.3 average and a whopping 1057 (or was it an 1109?) on my SAT. I remember being up all night the night before I took the test which I never studied for, which I didnt care about and whose significance I didnt and still do not understand. One of school chums had thrown a fab party that previous night and someone literally spiked the punch with a certain chemical substance (which probably RAISED my SAT by at least 100 points).
By some miracle or another, however, I was accepted into UC Santa Cruz — the slacker campus to which I had applied. I went up there for an orientation the spring before I graduated and had a lost weekend in the dorms. It seemed to me that at the time that if I enrolled there I would spend the next four years in a redwood and cannabis haze.
I made the right decision, I think, and instead enrolled at what was then called San Fernando Valley State College (now known as CSUN). What a great choice and not only because it was a few miles from where I lived. I got there just in time for the school to explode in social activism, offering me an education I would have never achieved stumbling around in Ben Loman.
To Balter: geeze, u were a big slacker than I !
To Woody: I never had a 2-s deferment, by the way. I was 1-A for three years and even had a pre-induction physical. That was until I got a legitmate 4-F. But you gotta pay for that story. Anyway, Woody, it’s true that in the 60′s brimmed with students who were there for many reasons but also took advantage of getting a 2-S. A lot of them now work for the Bush administration, don’t they?
March 15th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
“Its too soon to tell. No one – especially on Wall Street! – will deny that Capital is one of the most important works of economics ever written.”
You don’t read many WSJ op-eds, do you, cummings.
As for whether Marxism should “have another chance”, what a ridiculous issue! There is an entire nation of 1.2 billion people where everybody in government is a member of the Communist Party. It has an *economy* that’s increasingly capitalist (if anything, more capitalist than the U.S., if you count environmental and labor rights protections as “socialist”). But that’s no contradiction of Marxist principles.
Marx said that you need capitalism to prepare the ground and create the material abundance required for socialism, and eventually communism. China isn’t there yet, and may not get there for generations, if ever. And Marx didn’t think socialism in one country could work anyway. The Dicatorship of the Proletariat would require a global, unified proletariat. (The song isn’t called the Internationale for nothing.
Communism isn’t dead — it was never alive (as a social system). And any good apparatchik of any past or present Communist government would say so. The question isn’t “should Marxism be given another chance?” It’s “will Marxists ever see anything like the historical conditions where they might make good on their claims?” Who the hell knows?
To extent that the benefits of capitalism depend on continuing innovation (an unknown, as even Alan Greenspan admits), it’s an unanswerable question. Either innovation will peter out, or it won’t. We don’t know where nanotech and biotech might lead us. We don’t even really know where Moore’s Law will lead us, if it holds for another 20 years.
Marx was no great economist, except in terms of influence. In Joseph Schumpeter’s estimation, he was technically above average — mostly able to grasp the same insights as the great classical economists of his time, also prone to many of the same blind spots they suffered. But as an innovator in the field, he doesn’t offer much.
The power of his thought rests as much or more on its appeal, rather than on its absolute truth. The Labor Theory of Value? No economist has been able to make it work, theoretically, because it’s garbage. But the more important thing (especially in a democracy) might be that it *feels* true. And any economist will tell that what people *want* to be true matters, economically — even if the unintended consequences of such a virtual consensus might result in perverse and undesirable effects. After all, people wanted the bubbles of recent years to reflect a final end to the business cycle, the promise of uninterrupted prosperity. And for a while, it really felt that way.
March 15th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Just to correct a mis-perception. My mother-in-law graduated from UCLA in the mid 1940′s. Tuition was not free. It was either $24 or $27 per semester. Maybe you could get a PhD for free, but not if you went to UCLA en route. It would have cost a couple of hundred bucks to get thru college. But it was probably worth it, from what I hear.
But tuition wasn’t the whole story back then. My mom got a full scholarship to Northwestern in the 30′s. She couldn’t go because she had no money to travel from Independence, Mo. to Chicago.
March 16th, 2007 at 6:42 am
John McDaniel,
As RLC noted the free tuition started with Pat Brown. Sorry for the lack of clarification.
March 16th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Marx and Wall Street – I meant among brokers – see stuff by Henwood, Zizek – I forget the guy’s name but one of the top dudes at Chase Manhatten swears by Marx. On Bay Street (Toronto’s Wall Street) Marx hasa cult following as well. These folks are not at all anti-capitlaist (and nor was Marx, in fact) – but they find Marx’s understanding of what we now call the business cycle to be very helpful.
Turner, your understanding of other aspects of Marx is interesting and non sectarian, but with respect, to simplify the labour theory of value as crap misunderstands it. Many capitalist value theories build on it, its quite influential.
March 16th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Kevin, and from what you post, I can tell that you don’t.
jcumming, I think it was back in the 1970′s that radicals at Stanford and similar bastions of liberalism had major protests to remove Western Civilization from the history curriculum. The Bible never had a chance except as literature, which is like discussing Moby Dick as a whale story only.
Marc, as least the Bush folks didn’t “loathe” the military and refuse to even respond to their draft board letters. Your 4-F, which most people probably don’t know what it is, reminds me of a hilarious story by Dick Feynman, a physicist who helped developed the atomic bomb, won the Nobel Prize, and later taught at Cal Tech. He was rejected by the military because the psychiatrists at his induction physical considered him crazy. His story of that is in his books, and they are worth reading for the enjoyment.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:32 am
“major protests to remove Western Civilization from the history curriculum. The Bible never had a chance except as literature, which is like discussing Moby Dick as a whale story only.”
This is amazing….the total misapprehension. There was never a movement at Stanford to “remove Western Civilization from the history curriculum”. That Woody thinks that’s what the Stanford controversy over the content of core humanities curriculum back in the ’70s was about is a window into the kind of “information” he traverses his world with. On the Bible and Moby Dick – I’m baffled by how discussing any text as literature reduces Moby Dick to a whale story. In what context, exactly should one discuss it ? Perhaps for Woody, with his Ahab-like obsessions, it holds a special meaning. As for question of studying the Bible, here’s are two courses currently being taught for undergraduates at the dreaded Occidental College he attempted to lamoon earlier :
THE WORLD OF THE NEW TESTAMENT – Survey of the major books of the New Testament. This course will set the books of the New Testament within their social, political, and religious contexts, considering how such texts represented, as well as shaped, various forms of Christianity. The course will also examine the process and criteria of canonization in light of these diverse beliefs and practices. Special attention will be paid to the different interpretive methods and uses of the texts in the first few centuries of the Jesus movement.
THE CHARACTER OF GOD.
The Bible is the foundational classic of Western literature as well as the sacred scripture of Christianity. God, as the central character in this classic, may be apprehended by literary as well as theological or religious means. But when this is done, the point in God’s story at which he becomes a Jew—namely, Jesus of Nazareth—is seen to coincide with a marked change in his character. After a brief historical review of how the two-testament Christian Bible came into being, this course will examine, comparatively, passages in the Old Testament and the New that bring this change into focus. (end clips)
If Woody really cared about this question, he should check out the the discipline of Biblical hermeneutics which even among conservative evangelicals, employs the principles of interpretive and textual analysis that are common to all academic study of literature in order to discern meaning.
Of course, while Woody’s getting exercised about all of the crazy stuff going on in colleges in California, they’re teaching courses on the meaning of 1980s Music Videos down at the University of Georgia. Get your pitchfork out and head over there…
March 16th, 2007 at 8:36 am
uh…that would be “lampoon” – I need to edit this crap before I “submit”
March 16th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Woody –
I think you misinterpret your data. First off, schools of theology teach the bible in an exegetical/religious matter. Not every school has divinity/religion/theology programs. Second, yes, there were some id. politics types that succesfully CHANGED not removed western civ. education away from a sort of top-down glorified version of the topic to a more complex manner – pissing off conservatives along the way. That being said, there are plenty of universities taht teach western civ. in a moreclassical manner.
March 16th, 2007 at 9:23 am
Woody demands classes that ponder, “How many Christians can dance on the head of a needle.”
March 16th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Woody, given the treatment of the wounded at Walter Reed plus the sending of units to Iraq without training or equipment I’ll look elsewhere for support thank you.
You know like Dick Chaney I had “Other Priorities” in 1968 when I was classified 1-A and lost my appeal (and decided to enlist so I wouldn’t be an 11B). But the people at selective service didn’t see it the same way.
And daddy couldn’t get me in the National Guard either!
March 16th, 2007 at 10:16 am
And maybe they didn’t teach “Moby Dick” at Stanford because one of the leading critics of Melville – H. Bruce Franklin – was kicked off the faculty for being a marxist.
March 16th, 2007 at 11:11 am
There is absolutely no way living in Los Angeles that I can send my (hypothetical) kids to decent public grade school, quality college, and buy a house. It’s not possible on a normal salary. The house my parent’s bought in their late 20′s just went for a million dollars. College tuition increases have already been noted. Public schools in LA are a well-documented disaster. If taxes can solve two of these three monumental financial problems facing average families then almost any rate is worth paying. And if you look at the tax rate differences between the 1960′s and today, the top tax brackets are taking home the majority of the difference.
March 16th, 2007 at 11:20 am
parents (I hate apostrophe errors)
March 16th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Mavis hit it on the button. Until we’re willing to pay for it – as we were in the fifties and sixties under governors like Warren and Brown – we will definitely get what we pay for: very little.
March 16th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
reg, you exceeded my reading limit for words in a comment.
To save me typing….
Leadership U.
Let’s look at a few places where political correctness has had a major impact. In 1988 the Stanford faculty voted to change the Western Culture course, one of the most popular on campus, to “Cultures, Ideas and Values.” The fifteen-book requirement was dropped and replaced with the admonition to give substantial attention to issues of race(5) and gender. The reading list now had to include a quota of works by women and minorities. Out goes Shakespeare, in comes Burgos-Debray.
Shakespeare is deemed to be racist, sexist, and classist, a product of the ultimate evil–Western Civilization. French writer Elisabeth Burgos-Debray is, on the other hand, politically correct. One of her works, now part of the Stanford curriculum, describes a Guatemalan woman’s struggle against capitalist oppression. She rejects marriage and motherhood and becomes a feminist, a socialist, and finally a Marxist, arguing politics with fellow revolutionaries in Paris. According to the author, this simple Guatemalan woman speaks for all the Indians of the American continent.(6)
Berkeley, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Wisconsin are just a few of the schools where students must take a course in ethnic studies but are not required to take a single course in Western Civilization. At Berkeley, the ethnic studies course is the only required course on campus, and Wisconsin students can graduate without taking any American history. Ohio State has gone even further, revamping its entire curriculum to reflect issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. The chairman of the English department at Pennsylvania State University has remarked, “I would bet that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is taught in more English departments today than all of Shakespeare’s plays combined.”(7)
An ironic twist to this revolution is that when writings of third- world authors are included in the curriculum, they rarely are the classics from that culture. Instead, they tend to be recent, Marxist, and politically correct works.
Mavis wrote: If taxes can solve two of these three monumental financial problems facing average families then almost any rate is worth paying.
To which I shake my head in dismay.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Everyone knows UCLA is mostly Asian. Why is anybody’s guess. Increase the population, and apply new criteria ever-more-difficult and you have the west coast version of the Ive League. It’s still half the price of the NE so?
March 16th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
I’ll tell you one thing, there’s no grade inflation at CSUN. As the Lithuanian geography professor told us one day in class, “at CSUN D=Diploma.” Of course my GPA was much higher. Mr. Cooper did you graduate from San Fernando State College? Because I did. I was 4F too for medical reasons, but a long way from here.
March 17th, 2007 at 12:03 am
Woody:
My remarks are what they are, stupid or not. I don’t use an appeal to authority (your alleged “education”) to defend them.
You, on the other hand, use deliberate distortions of what another person (Randy Paul) writes (“typical liberal”, snicker), and then when your silly comments are destroyed, use childish insults (i.e. “prick”) to sharpen the point on the top of your head.
Reg sussed you out a long time ago. You are a poseur.
In short, Fuck Off, you silly person.
March 17th, 2007 at 12:09 am
Actually, now that it is the 17th, in honor of my ancestors, Woody:
Feck Off, ya prick.
March 17th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Kev, how stupid. You start ridiculing my remarks as uneducated and then take offense when I turn it back around. Give up.
Also, Randy never proved his case. Reagan did not do a total dismissal of his U.S. attorneys as did Clinton immediately upon entering office. Clinton’s firings were unprecedented in our history, and the only way that anyone can say that they are the same is to believe Democratic lies and distortions. Don’t give me vague quotes from someone. Get specifics, and you’ll find that I’m right. If what you have is “destroying” my comments, then anything will suit you just to avoid the truth. Maybe you think that Randy destroyed my thoughts on Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark when he started referring to him as Ramsey Lewis. You guys are soooooo smart.
Also, in honor of my heritage on St. Patrick’s Day, I’m wearing orange.
March 17th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Is Woody arguing that Clinton fired the US attorneys because he resented that they were investigating Democrats? Is he positing that the current administration did not fire the US attorney because they were investigating Republicans or did not respond to political pressure to investigate Democrats? Or is he just picking yet another fight on yet another thread in a pathetic attempt to give his own meager and obviously lonely existence some kind of meaning? State your point and move on. There is zero reason to get in a pissing match with Woody. I’ve never run across anyone with more contempt for the truth. Much like Fox News, his efforts shouldn’t be rewarded.
March 17th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Randy never proved his case. Reagan did not do a total dismissal of his U.S. attorneys as did Clinton immediately upon entering office.
Yes he did Woody. Who should any of us be;lieve: a serial liar such as yourself or a former Acting Attorney General appointed by a republican president.
Or is he just picking yet another fight on yet another thread in a pathetic attempt to give his own meager and obviously lonely existence some kind of meaning? State your point and move on. There is zero reason to get in a pissing match with Woody
You’re 100% right, Mavis.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:36 am
Typical Democrats…cut and run.
March 18th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Cut this.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
About any subsidy–NPR, universities, etc. I first ask the question, “Should a gardener in LA have to pay taxes to support this activity?”
The answer is usually no.
That doesn’t exhaust the question. For example, if subsidized research develops ways to make food cheaper, combat disease, etc., and the private sector doesn’t have incentives to do the same research, perhaps a gardener should pay taxes for it. And perhaps our gardener should pay for things that elevate society as a whole, say Mozart concerts, even if he prefers corridos to sonatas.
It’s not an easy balance to strike.
As for crackpot ideologues of the left, there are quite a few in ethnic and women’s studies, lots in the humanities, and a fair number in some of the social sciences. Given the weakness of the movements they long for, such folks are more attracted to the “idiocy of [campus] life” than to the cubicles of corporate America.
I suspect though, some of us dotards fantasize about taxpayer-subsidized sexual Disneylands whose wardens are armies of deranged Ward Churchills whispering the words of Foucault into the empty brains of stoned, nubile coeds. The truth is no doubt a bit more mundane.
If students are lucky, they’ll graduate sober, STD-free, only mildly neurotic, and perhaps will have learned a thing or two. Anyone who expects more
March 18th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
. . . who expects more is probably either an eternal optimist or a flack for some institution of “higher learning.”
March 18th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Grumpy, I’m getting sick of your endless stream of sensible conservative comments. Unless and until you assume the position of wild-eyed right-wing yahoo with nothing to contribute other than unbridled invective against liberals and a storehouse of dubious “facts”, I refuse to respond. There’s no fun in simply splitting hairs over issues like the quantitative meaning of “quite a few”, “lots” or “fair number”.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I must be losing my edge.
March 25th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Hi Marc
April 5th, 2007 at 12:53 am
Excuse, and what you think concerning forthcoming elections?
April 9th, 2007 at 2:41 am
cool blog!
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