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Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Now thats just one example. Another might be the Middle East, and how some of the extremists are still pissed off about the Crusades etc, which stopped hundreds of years ago. How can they hold any country responsible for the actions that long ago?

So when do you let go of the past, and treat it as a bad memory?

That's a good question, especially in light of Europe being invaded by Muslims coming up through Spain and France hundreds of years before anyone thought of the first crusade, but not many people mention that in the Middle East. As far as what happened with the various tribes in the US that were pushed off their lands by settlers, do they in turn owe apologies to the tribes they displaced before Europeans and others came here? I have a lot of friends whose ancestors were Aztec, but I don't think they should have to apologize for their empire's slavery of other tribes.

In my own case, I'm decended from MacDougal and Bruce clans, somewhere, somebody kissed and made up because those two clans hated each other. Missouri had an extermination order on the books for Mormons until recently, but hey, I don't think anyone's killed one under that law for a while.

I think the best thing to do in the end is to just treat people fairly and well and things will work out.

whatwhat wrote:
So basically you saw something you couldn't afford and yet still bought it.

Not really. If you want a job in the US, a good job anyway, college is essentially a prerequisite. There isn't much in the way of an alternative, besides technical school; and even that ends up costing about as much as a 4 year degree over a lifetime, given retraining and technological changes.

whatwhat wrote:
I am having trouble believing you, either you're not telling the truth or you're incredibly dumb to have gotten yourself into so much debt over education.

When people talk about the crisis situation in American higher education they aren't joking. It is enormously expensive. When you factor in room and board, which is often required for the first 2 years, even bottom tier state schools cost a little under 20k a year. Compare this to:

Kilkrazy wrote:I think a student at an English university is looking at £3,000+ per year for tuition (three year degree) plus living expenses.

That's about 10k a year in USD, and the program is a year shorter. If that's your standard of educational costs, you'll forgive me if I find your ranting irrelevant.

And to preempt statements of 'you should finish early': at most institutions you pay by the credit, so it doesn't matter.

Frazzled wrote:Guaranteed student loans are in fact, guaranteed by the US gov. I am not sure if its a full 100% or not though, or if all the loans in discussion were guaranteeds. Mine were.

Guaranteed loans are still backed 100%. Some of my loans fell into this category.

Being in the process of getting my degree....yea, its horribly expensive, and i'm going to a fairly affordable school.

I don't know about other countries. It's debatable whether crimes are passed down through the generations. If it's, say, the fault of the government or the invading country/people/whatever, then an apology is deserved. Last year, our prime minister Kevid Rudd officially apologised to the Aboriginals (indigenous Australians) on behalf of the white Australians for the massacres, invasion, and the Stolen Generations, a system running for parts of the 19th and 20th centuries in which Aboriginal children (even so-called 'half-castes', a nickname for half-white children) were taken away from their families and tribes and placed in government institutions.

Just a bit of education for the yanks and poms.

dogma wrote:Not really. If you want a job in the US, a good job anyway, college is essentially a prerequisite....When people talk about the crisis situation in American higher education they aren't joking. It is enormously expensive. When you factor in room and board, which is often required for the first 2 years, even bottom tier state schools cost a little under 20k a year.

And they call your country the land of the free? Absolutely laughable.

Honestly we're not living in the eighteen hundreds anymore, that's ridiculous. Education is a right not a privilege.

Sometimes your country baffles me, you're supposedly one of the greatest countries in the world yet there are still parts of your country where kids run around with no shoes on their feet. And to add to that I now hear you have an archaic education system which basically gives anyone from poor backgrounds no chance whatsoever. Why don't we just find those walls we pulled down around the class system and build them back up.

Wait, is your university publicly funded? We are talking university here (our high school I think is called college on your side of the pond).

Its my understanding your poor son of a steel worker is not going to get into Oxford let alon pay for it so lets watch the who's free/privileged or not.

I'm talking university.

I'm from Benwell, a fairly underpriveleged area of newcastle. I know others from my area who went to durham, a university not far beneath as oxford/cambridge. They like me, got all their tuition fees paid for by the state, not to mention a grant for living fees and a loan on top of that. Whatsmore In scotland higher education is free and recently this has been being thrown around in the national media as an idea for all the uk.

Thankfully your belief that the working class have no chance of getting into oxford is quite far from the truth, and it is the ability of the student which gets them there.

Really. Is this for everyone or just scholarships? I'm not talking getting in, I am talking paid for.

It's for anyone on application but involves your local council reviewing both your own and your parent's financial circumstances, and less is granted to the privileged. In some cases where their might be limited acces to university the councils are more generous and allow more money for traveling further afield.

So its a scholarship program. Ayah we have gobs of those as well as federal and state financial aid.

So how do you manage to get in to 120,000 dollars worth of debt?

I've got dogma telling me your higher education is expensive, I've got you telling me it's not. Which is it?

I didn't say it wasn't expensive. It depends on the school/state, public/private, and what kind of shcolarships I can get. I've seen that level of debt with grad students/doctor types, but usually its known going in. You're either giong to make a lot of money within 10 years or you're rich and picked a cheap field.

You almost had me going. I was about to be all over you finding out what your tax rates are to support higher education/universal healthcare etc. Oh well, my dream continues to be dead.

So you're trying to say your system doesn't favour the priveleged and yet the likes of students going for a medical course are supposed to expect 120k worth of debt?

I mean for one if you can actually get loans like that, which i guess you can't as dogma stated he had to go to multiple banks, no fricking wonder we are in a recession and why isn't the dollar worth like 1 hundredth of my pound? I can't imagine you can, so how can you expect someone from a poor background to be able to afford it? I wouldn't think they would be able to.

I went to a 23K a year private college in the midwest. I payed about $4500 a year outof pocket and came out owing about $12,000 in student loans. There are ways around everything. I started at a Junior college for all the 100 level courses so that saved me one year of the expensive school. I worked before I went to school so I could afford it up front as opposed of taking a 'loan' for the rest of my life. I went to the private college when I was 24 so I was considered living on my own for financial aid purposes and got a ton of free grants from the school and government because my income was tied to me and not my parents. There are ways around everything.

As for having to go to college, the 3 richest people I know personally never went to college. College is definitely not the way to a good job. If you are unmotivated or 'lost' in your ambition about your future, then most people just go to college because they think that's what they have to do. Not true.

whatwhat wrote:So you're trying to say your system doesn't favour the priveleged and yet the likes of students going for a medical course are supposed to expect 120k worth of debt?

I mean for one if you can actually get loans like that, which i guess you can't as dogma stated he had to go to multiple banks, no fricking wonder we are in a recession and why isn't the dollar worth like 1 hundredth of my pound? I can't imagine you can, so how can you expect someone from a poor background to be able to afford it? I wouldn't think they would be able to.

They can get that level of debt but then again they'll make $150M to $200M out of the box. But yes college is way too expsnive and the fact the costs are growing twice the rate of inflation is both illogical and criminal.

DarthDiggler wrote:I went to a 23K a year private college in the midwest. I payed about $4500 a year outof pocket and came out owing about $12,000 in student loans. There are ways around everything. I started at a Junior college for all the 100 level courses so that saved me one year of the expensive school. I worked before I went to school so I could afford it up front as opposed of taking a 'loan' for the rest of my life. I went to the private college when I was 24 so I was considered living on my own for financial aid purposes and got a ton of free grants from the school and government because my income was tied to me and not my parents. There are ways around everything.

12k would sound perfectly resonable in the uk also. Out of interest, had you not taken those measures how much of a debt would you have came out with?

DarthDiggler wrote:As for having to go to college, the 3 richest people I know personally never went to college. College is definitely not the way to a good job. If you are unmotivated or 'lost' in your ambition about your future, then most people just go to college because they think that's what they have to do. Not true.

Exactly the same in the uk. Dogma disagrees however...

dogma wrote:If you want a job in the US, a good job anyway, college is essentially a prerequisite

Frazzled wrote:

whatwhat wrote:So you're trying to say your system doesn't favour the priveleged and yet the likes of students going for a medical course are supposed to expect 120k worth of debt?

I mean for one if you can actually get loans like that, which i guess you can't as dogma stated he had to go to multiple banks, no fricking wonder we are in a recession and why isn't the dollar worth like 1 hundredth of my pound? I can't imagine you can, so how can you expect someone from a poor background to be able to afford it? I wouldn't think they would be able to.

They can get that level of debt but then again they'll make $150M to $200M out of the box. But yes college is way too expsnive and the fact the costs are growing twice the rate of inflation is both illogical and criminal.

I understand that, it's the under privileged student I'm thinking about. What they make after education is of no concern to them if they can't afford the education in the first place.

whatwhat wrote:

I understand that, it's the under privileged student I'm thinking about. What they make after education is of no concern to them if they can't afford the education in the first place.

Actually that is. If I am giong to come out making excellent money then I can afford a higher tuition/debt.

If I am going into carbon fiber R&D/engineering I can afford such and such, but if I am ging into social work I can afford $3.50 and a cheeseburger.

Sure but I am still in disbelief that anyone actually gives a student that much money.

I could have a patent for a working time machine and I'd still struggle to find someone who would give me that easily.

The way I see it even the best plausible loan would mean you would still need some financial backing in the first place.

If I had not taken those steps I probably wouldn't have been able to get into the private college at all. Since I was older than 23 I was also considered a non-traditional transfer student. American colleges love to have a diverse incoming class, so much so that there have been public cases of racial divisions implemented to insure the racial mix of an incoming class over the abilities of the students. I used this to my advantage by getting slotted into one of the smallest divisions, non-traditional transfer. My high school scores weren't good enough to get me in otherwise.

I finished school in 3 years so that would have been about $75,000 if I went the most common route. I also used this trick to get a Master Degree for about $5000. Certain public school districts have very generous contracts with their employees. I found one, near my house, which awarded up to $750 for each graduate class taken while employed in the district. You didn't have to be a teacher at all so I became a part time teachers aid. I worked about 4-5 hours a day, scheduled around my grad classes, and commuted to the university for my grad school classes. When I was done with grad school I left the school district with them paying for a huge chunk of my schooling. As I've said, there are ways around everything.

whatwhat wrote:Sure but I am still in disbelief that anyone actually gives a student that much money.

I could have a patent for a working time machine and I'd still struggle to find someone who would give me that easily.

I have $7 (goes and buys a candy bar) sorry $6 for your patent, hows that?

Or we can go fifty fifty. We'll go back in time and I'll change my name to Bill Gates and you to Steve Jobs and maybe do some start ups...

I don't know what you're repayments are in the US, but over here you don't start paying until you reach a certain level, which increases as your wage increases, plus it's interest free. My stepson is now on £21,000 and his repayment has started, don't know how much though.

thats true about the repayments, but it's not completely interst free. I know because I still have a fair bit of my own to pay off.

Frazzled wrote:

whatwhat wrote:Sure but I am still in disbelief that anyone actually gives a student that much money.

I could have a patent for a working time machine and I'd still struggle to find someone who would give me that easily.

I have $7 (goes and buys a candy bar) sorry $6 for your patent, hows that?

Or we can go fifty fifty. We'll go back in time and I'll change my name to Bill Gates and you to Steve Jobs and maybe do some start ups...

Well unfortunately my time machine only travels forwards in time not back, I call it a watch. Oh and I'll take the $6 dollars thanks.

DarthDiggler wrote:I finished school in 3 years so that would have been about $75,000 if I went the most common route.

Ah, well that's all I needed to hear.

Backinmyday (TM) they had various forms of loan deferments.

Frazzled wrote:So its a scholarship program. Ayah we have gobs of those as well as federal and state financial aid.

That sounds more like out Stafford, or Perkins loan programs. They get awarded on the basis of need, and are really the only reason I could afford to go to school at all.

Frazzled wrote:I didn't say it wasn't expensive. It depends on the school/state, public/private, and what kind of shcolarships I can get. I've seen that level of debt with grad students/doctor types, but usually its known going in. You're either giong to make a lot of money within 10 years or you're rich and picked a cheap field.

It depends on where you go to school. Most of the grad/law/med guys that I know are expecting to sit on 200k-250k once they finish up, and that's usually with a generous FAFSA package. That said, median starting income out of 1st or 2nd tier law school is about 75k. Assuming you can reign in your spending habits, and avoid marriage, you might be able to pay that down in 6-7 years.

DarthDiggler wrote:I went to a 23K a year private college in the midwest. I payed about $4500 a year outof pocket and came out owing about $12,000 in student loans. There are ways around everything. I started at a Junior college for all the 100 level courses so that saved me one year of the expensive school.

Did they accept all of your transfer credit? I know a lot of schools virtually refuse to do that anymore. Though my experience is more with the Ivies and near-Ivies, so that probably plays a part.

DarthDiggler wrote:
As for having to go to college, the 3 richest people I know personally never went to college. College is definitely not the way to a good job. If you are unmotivated or 'lost' in your ambition about your future, then most people just go to college because they think that's what they have to do. Not true.

A lot of it depends on where you live, and who you know. I'm from a white collar town (if that wasn't already obvious), and I know white collar people. There wasn't really any path towards a blue collar job simply because I didn't have the connections. My high school didn't even have a shop.

DarthDiggler wrote:
As I've said, there are ways around everything.

Not always. Sometimes all you can do is go through. Especially if you're white, suburban, and middle class.

Frazzled wrote:Backinmyday (TM) they had various forms of loan deferments.

They still do, I'm on deferment right now. Mostly because I'm employed in a luxury industry.

To put a topical spin on this latest batch of posts... Let's say your great, great grandfather was a slave in this country. Should you have been provided a program that payed for that schooling instead of having to put yourself into all that debt?

I say no, but there are plenty of people out there that would say yes, I'm wondering why?

I think it's unreasonable to deal with things which happened before living memory.

Dogma,

There are always ways around everything. I'm from the near west side of Chicago. Some of the biggest gang infested areas. My brother and I were raised by a single Mother and most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from relatives in Buffalo. I'm walking around Chicago in a Buffalo Bills jersey growing up in the 70's. The 3 richest guys our family knew growing up all were entrepreneurs who started their own business and became successful. I'm talking move out of state and into mansions successful. No college degree needed, just time, sweat, and dedication to succeed. The idea you need a college degree to get a good job is a little overblown. You need a college degree to work for somebody else. You need ambition and a good work ethic to succeed, period.

There are other memebers of the family who lived in nicer neighborhoods. Those kids future was mapped outfrom birth. High school, college, work. They didn't need to think for themselves about their future because it was planned for them. They were expected to follow that path and they did with no ambition and very little desire. The outcome was as expected.

I'm not saying one way is better than the other and I'm not judging either one of our paths. I'm just saying there is more than one way to skin a cat.

If you are benefitting from the things that Britain did in the past (which were not all bad, they did get rid of slavery after dabbling in it). Then Britain, as a nation, should take it upon itself to protect and continue to nurture it's relationship with the nations once under it's control, as they try to find their feet. I read in the EMPIRE by...someone, forget who, that the colonies by Britain had a far higher ratio of founding democratic nations than other Imperialist nations.

Britain should help the Commonwealth nations, which it often does but they could do more, instead of leaving the nations to drift.

DarthDiggler wrote:
There are always ways around everything.

I think you're right insofar as we're talking about general success. The problem for most people is that they have a very specific idea of what success means for them. For example, no one I went to school with would consider themselves successful if they were working as an auto mechanic, no matter how much money they were earning. Realistically I'm the same way. So when you get these road blocks dropped in your way, it becomes an intractable problem. One which is compounded by encroaching debt, family obligations, etc.

That isn't to say that auto mechanics aren't successful people, but that success can only be defined personally.

DarthDiggler wrote:
I'm from the near west side of Chicago. Some of the biggest gang infested areas. My brother and I were raised by a single Mother and most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from relatives in Buffalo. I'm walking around Chicago in a Buffalo Bills jersey growing up in the 70's. The 3 richest guys our family knew growing up all were entrepreneurs who started their own business and became successful. I'm talking move out of state and into mansions successful. No college degree needed, just time, sweat, and dedication to succeed.

And start-up capital, which is realistically equivalent to a college degree. Either in terms of debt, or opportunity cost. I suppose a better way to say it is: success in America is expensive.

DarthDiggler wrote:
The idea you need a college degree to get a good job is a little overblown. You need a college degree to work for somebody else. You need ambition and a good work ethic to succeed, period.

Inevitably you always work for someone else, whether its a boss or a customer is simply a matter of semantics. Also, as much as no one likes to believe it, luck is nearly as vital as initiative and persistence.

DarthDiggler wrote:
There are other memebers of the family who lived in nicer neighborhoods. Those kids future was mapped outfrom birth. High school, college, work. They didn't need to think for themselves about their future because it was planned for them. They were expected to follow that path and they did with no ambition and very little desire. The outcome was as expected.

Yeah, I've met plenty of those people. They got to college because their parents rode them through high school. In college they lack the dedication to apply themselves to their work, or the talent to graduate in spite of themselves.

DarthDiggler wrote:
I'm not saying one way is better than the other and I'm not judging either one of our paths. I'm just saying there is more than one way to skin a cat.

There's plenty of ways to skin a cat, some are simply more efficient than others. Education wouldn't be so expensive if it wasn't a massive asset in terms of the probability of success.