Obama's diploma mill.
... And as you might expect, the people who stand to receive the most money under the president's proposal are adamant in their belief that the country probably will not survive unless it is enacted at once. The president of the American Council on Education could barely contain herself.
"The education components of the new economic stimulus package prove that President Obama will back his words with resources and action,"
said Molly Corbett Broad. This is lobbyist talk for ka-ching! [snip]
The assumption here is that the way to make somebody a competitive worker is to send him to college, an idea that will astonish anyone who's ever been served in a restaurant by a waiter with a master's in art history. [snip]
When you expand the cohort to those between the ages of 25 and 65, the U.S. participation rate jumps and the United States ranks fifth among the 30 OECD countries. It turns out that lots of Americans earn their degrees after they've passed college age and even the middle years.
As a vocational matter, late learners are more likely to concentrate attention on abilities that the current marketplace needs, unlike kids who have to predict what jobs this finicky global economy of ours will be rewarding 10 years from now. And the learning is more likely to stick. Adults are smarter than teenagers. In general. [snip]
When he included four-year schools in his list of higher-ed options, the president was being very generous. (Why wouldn't he be? It's not his money.) But the traditional college was only one of four options.
In practice the three others--postsecondary education understood as job training--will be where the action is and, if we're lucky, where the students are.
[If our President was serious about expanding higher learning, he'd move it to the internet for its rudimentary baseline. Dissemination of information is exactly what the internet does - and can do so for anyone, of any age, at any time, as many times over their careers as necessary - for virtually (comparably speaking) FREE.
And that's the rub: there's not enough money to be made in 'free' - and our education system has a hammer lock on our President's party.
The vast majority of Americans aren't interested in a classic liberal arts indoctrination, they need marketable skills and (if free on the internet) probably want a fair amount of 'other' learning they find interesting (i.e., still not liberal indoctrination).
This is nothing more than yet another pay off to a special interest group that supports him - and an example of no-change-whatsoever when it comes to things liberal.
Our education challenges are overwhelming with the state-backed education industry currently highjacking it. We need to liberate it at both ends by a) universal vouchers for K-12 and b) and internet buffet for higher learning - and make it "all you can eat".]
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