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[wierd]

Personally, I feel that allowing employers to extend an "ALTERNATIVE" method of determining basic competency, that they don't have to pay for (VERY IMPORTANT!), is the immediate way forward.

Some means for an employer to go "OK, we will accept your GED or Diploma if you can satisfy this alternative requirement to prove that you can indeed read and write, do mathematics, and follow basic instructions at a level we find acceptable" so they dont have to reach right for "Got a degree?" as their immediate go-to.  Preferably with some kind of incentive for using it. (like a tax break).

This would likely be in the form of some kind of vocational readiness examination and certification program, that the employer can request instead, that is federally subsidized 100%.

Then there is no real reason for employers to demand higher education (and all its costs), for jobs that dont require them, and would not dilute the value of having the higher education credentials, or drive up costs from exploding demand.



If you combine that with corrections to the public education system, you win the game.


For those that already sunk the costs for the college degree that they only needed to be employable, forgiveness of the debts as a one-time thing to unfuck the system, in conjunction with the above, would make a suitable bandage until the new generation of children enter the job market, and the diploma and GED actually mean what they are supposed to mean to employers again.



I would like to point out that currently, should an employer want to perform a basic competency test, it is considered unfair under equal opportunity law, and is not permissible. (this is because it can be abused to disallow otherwise perfectly competent people based on some other, not disclosed criteria. The employer can just claim they did not pass to the level desired, and how can anyone know?  This is the reason why it has to be done through a testing and certification program outside the employer's control, with a paper trail.)

[McTraveller]

It's all about balance.  Yes, there are systemic issues making things more difficult for the current generation than I had 20 years ago*.  But this is not something you can fix by such a drastic action.  (I see replies have been posted: yes you can lessen some immediate pain with this - but I agree to fix it, you've got to "fix" culture and primary education and employer expectation is a huge part of it - this is a "generational" fix - 15 to 20 years, yes.)

I'm also of the opinion that it's not entirely the fault of "the system" - there has to be some personal skin in the game.  Maybe it's not even 50/50 - maybe it's 90% "system" and 10% "individual".

I'm not opposed to some sort of help for these students - I'm just opposed to 100% no-strings-attached, no personal responsibility help.

Also based on replies:  I think that's a philosophical debate on the role of government and just how much "fixing" versus "guiding" versus "controlling" it should have.  The problem with the forgiveness approach is this:  it doesn't actually provide any incentive to fix the underlying issues.  If you coupled the forgivness with say taxing college endowments or something to tie the fix to the cause, I'd be all for that.  But just simply taxing the general population who has almost no direct influence over the cost of education to pay for it - this doesn't help anything at all.

[Frumple]

Most of the people that would be helped out by debt forgiveness in this situation already have plenty of skin in the game, though. They spent years in education and then more years having chunks of their budget ripped out by loan payments. The personal responsibility has already been taken right in the bloody face, and it's led to masses of people that are meeting societal benchmarks (home, kids, retirement, etc.) later or not at all and pinning one of the largest factors for that on education costs in general -- and especially the often basically-fucking-unending costs of paying back student loans. The primary folks helped out by this wouldn't be active students, it would be workers, parents, and so on that are getting screwed by loan payments, and most of them have already taken plenty of beating from the issue.

Shit was pretty bad twenty years ago, too, though. I'm in my thirties and my mother is still paying off the debt that put her through school decades ago, just as one example among myriad. She went into K-12 ground-level education and maybe you can babble some shit about that being a poor investment, but saddling folks like that with near lifelong debt isn't exactly a good thing, either. Fixing situations like that would on the other hand be a pretty damn unequivocally good thing.

[Naturegirl1999]

Would it be possible for us to draft a hypothetical law here so if some of us run for Congress we would have a law that addresses these issues?

[wierd]

Not without input from experimental trials in school systems around the country to direct HOW to fix primary education EFFECTIVELY.


Shooting blindly in the dark is how you fuck the next generation even worse than yours was.  Understanding how an entire ecosystem of institutions will react to a change requires much more than just good intentions.

[McTraveller]

Shooting blindly in the dark is how you fuck the next generation even worse than yours was.  Understanding how an entire ecosystem of institutions will react to a change requires much more than just good intentions.

Truth.

Regarding "20 years ago" - 19 years ago I graduated with a 4-year degree with $200 cash, maybe $2000 in total assets, and $37k in debt. I started with a salary of $48k/year.  I had all may debt paid off in 5 or 6 years (can't remember exactly; it was fast!).  Part of that $37k in debt was a new car, I bought a cell phone, I took vacations, went out to eat, etc. I wasn't living in squalor by any means.  So unless it really is "the jobs" or some other cultural trend, I don't know what is materially so different - $25k in debt today is much smaller than $37k in debt 20 years ago.

[wierd]

It really is the difference between "A diploma would get you an entry level job" and "An associate degree will get you an entry level job in a dead end career" 

Combine that with "Everyone is getting degrees", which dilutes the real meaning of having the degree in the first place, in addition to the obvious outcome of overcrowded colleges, overworked professors, overstuffed dormitories, (all leading to increased on-campus violence and misbehavior), all contributing to spiraling cycles of ever increasing tuition, and the introduction of new loan systems that are downright predatory and cannot be discharged, often involving "incentives" to colleges to "encourage" students to take them.

You have to fix the bottom for the chaos at the top to go away. Not everyone SHOULD seek higher education. EVERYONE SHOULD graduate public school in a job-ready condition. (not glamorous employment, but liveable employment.) That is the state that needs to be restored.

[sluissa]

Inflation while wages have stagnated makes a difference as well. Education costs are going up, cost of living is going up. Wages are staying the same. Where before people could take the hit to their paycheck to pay off the loans and still manage a decent life, that loan payment has slowly eaten away at the non-necessities until for some people it's become a choice between food, power, or a loan payment.

Also slightly unrelated I'm hearing arguments from people against minimum wage increases that there are some jobs that just aren't meant to support a person. (specifically the burger flipping jobs, but there were other examples brought up.) Like, some jobs are meant for kids in high school who don't need to pay bills and that they should move on to something better if they ACTUALLY need money.
Which just seems like a load of bullshit. (Interestingly, this was a registered democrat that came up with this reasoning.)

[Naturegirl1999]

,I i,u, wage should increase, and ontinue to increase with inflation, it surprises me that a Democrat wouldn’t want wage increases

[wierd]

The concern is that wage increases will increase rate of inflation increase, such that the people are worse off than before, despite getting more dollars.


See for example this contrivance:

Spoiler: needlessly elaborate contrivance (click to show/hide)

Joe makes 10$/hr, and gets a 10% increase in pay, due to an increase in wages across the board.

Retailers all want a slice of that increase, and shoot for the full 10%; All of Joe's itemized expenses increase 10% EACH.


We will say that Joe makes ~20k/yr before the increase, and makes  ~23k/yr after the increase.

He paid ~173$/week on groceries (out of 400$ gross, or about 43% of his GROSS pay), which we will say had the following breakdown:

Milk (2$/gal)
Eggs (.36$/doz cheap store brand)
Sugar (3$/lb)
Flour (2.5$/lb)
Breakfast cereal (2.5$/box, 3 boxes)
Meat (3$/lb, 10lb)
Vegetables (5$/lb, 20lb)
Coffee (8$/bag)
Household cleansers (4$/bottle, 5 bottles [inculdes detergent, softener, allpurpose, dish soap, etc.])


EACH item goes up 10%, because of market greed.


They now cost this much.

Milk (2.2$/gal)
Eggs (.39$/doz cheap store brand)
Sugar (3.3$/lb)
Flour (2.7$/lb)
Breakfast cereal (2.7$/box, 3 boxes)
Meat (3.3$/lb, 10lb)
Vegetables (5.5$/lb, 20lb)
Coffee (8.8$/bag)
Household cleansers (4.4$/bottle, 5 bottles [inculdes detergent, softener, allpurpose, dish soap, etc.])

So his NEW bill is ~190.5$/wk (out of 440$/wk gross, which is still ~43% of his gross pay


His pay raise DID NOTHING.



BUT-- perhaps that pay raise put Joe into a new tax bracket.  Now he takes home less of his gross than he did before. He is WORSE OFF than before the rate increase.

Perhaps the increase puts Joe higher than the cutoff for a government assistance program he was previously using, and now cannot use it anymore. Again- WORSE OFF than before.

That's just for Joe, (and others like him) earning exactly minimum wage.



What happens to the shmucks who make more than that?

Bill was making 11/hr before the new increase; His pay after the increase REMAINS UNCHANGED.

All his expenses went up 10%.


This latter is what is meant by "wages have remained unchanged."  People making 20/hr before a min wage increase continue making 20/hr after the increase. People at the bottom get more dollars, but that only moves these people DOWN.

What the fed needs to do, is to decouple inflation from min wage increase, by stating that retailers CANNOT attempt to gobble down the full value increase with a price hike.

So that say, with the 10% min wage increase, retail prices can only be raised 5%. That would give Joe actually increased spending power after all his expenses. Good luck getting that past lobbyists though. (you know, the whole 'But muh FREE MARKETS!! Government interference! SOCIALISM!!!" schtick)

They also need to state that with an increase in min-wage, *ALL WAGES* must increase the same percentage, not just the min-wage earners' wages.


The combination would actually put buying power on the rise again. It would also come at the direct expense of retailer and service provider PROFITS. They would all scream bloody murder, and would increasingly seek to eliminate domestic labor positions with renewed vigor.


Basically, the real solution is to somehow force enterprise to accept lower profits, across the board, in all sectors, in all industries, and leave them with no option but to accept that outcome.  Good luck with that.

[WealthyRadish]

Much of the revenue today generated under modern mixed-market corporate capitalism is essentially economic rent derived from some sort of monopoly. If there were a reliable means of distinguishing that revenue from the "legitimate" earnings of capital, it could be taxed at exorbitant rates without passing costs to consumers and redistributed as a UBI. A more traditional land value tax would also go a long way, particularly as it could replace property tax and be taxed at a much higher rate, but a major problem in the US is the federal structure where municipal, state, and federal taxes need to coexist.

However, in my view the only really reliable way of keeping standards of living high for the working class and subsequently everyone else (except the rich) is worker organization and collective bargaining. Countries with extensive unionization don't generally require minimum wage laws or have the same problems with education. Since that will never happen in a country as backward as the United States, I think it's more likely that we'll hobble along until the hegemony collapses and end up looking something like what Russia looks like today.

[McTraveller]

A portion of all minimum wage increases will impact price levels - all else equal.  So if you are in an area where there is a constraint on housing or something, then housing will likely eat up all the minimum wage increase.  If instead you are in an area where housing is very available, then minimum wage increases will not result in price level increases.

It's all about supply and demand, accounting for the local market constraints.  That last part of the statement is often overlooked.

So the real answer is - nobody really knows how much minimum wage increases will cause prices to increase, we know it's not zero but it may not quite be 100%.

EDIT: Yes, if it were possible to separate rent income from actual wealth-creative income, and only tax the rent, that would be helpful.  Interestingly, this is how many very-early tax systems worked; if you were forced to farm poor-yielding land because all the good-yielding land was taken, the producers on the good-yielding land were taxed on their productive delta to the poorer-yielding land.  Basically this meant you didn't necessarily want to have the best land - because your tax rate was higher.

[smjjames]

IMO the best way the wage should work is have it be above the living wage for an area since it'll vary from area to area and state to state.

So the real answer is - nobody really knows how much minimum wage increases will cause prices to increase, we know it's not zero but it may not quite be 100%.

I wonder if that's in part due to the wage not keeping pace for so long that they've forgotten what the economy looks like during a wage increase.

[Naturegirl1999]

IMO the best way the wage should work is have it be above the living wage for an area since it'll vary from area to area and state to state.

So the real answer is - nobody really knows how much minimum wage increases will cause prices to increase, we know it's not zero but it may not quite be 100%.

I wonder if that's in part due to the wage not keeping pace for so long that they've forgotten what the economy looks like during a wage increase.

This is probably the case

[Folly]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There's this problem with education costs in the US.

1) Primary education (I include highschool here, even though the term has specific meaning for gradeschool in the US) has had severe quality issues because they want to genericize curriculum instead of tailor it for each classroom, to meet certain standardized metrics which has resulted in school systems tailoring education to meet the letter but not the intent of those standard metrics. The result is very poor education in general. To add insult to this, keeping underperforming children back a year is a big black mark against the school, and so schools will pull every dirty trick imaginable to prevent it happening. The result is the defacto pushing along of students that really really really do need extra effort and teaching time through the system. The consequence of this leads to...

2) Employers have noticed. They have resorted to making "college degree" the new standard for "Yes, I can read, do mathematics, and follow basic instructions", and NO-- THEY WONT COMPROMISE ON IT.

3) Since the baseline for "It's a job that isn't flipping burgers" is now "at least an associate's degree" and "A job that actually pays something I can live on" is now "At least a bachelor's degree", the college education system is just overloaded with students to the point where tuition and fees balloon into the stratosphere.

4) The legislature does nothing about this, because:

 A) That would require admitting that their well-meaning policies at the federal level have resulted in a situation that is absolute shit.
 B) There is blowback from the voter-base about increasing spending to pay for remedial education, or to provide incentives for better quality education and materials
 C) A certain political party is just in fucking love with ideas that create perverse incentives in the educational system that cause this kind of mess, and wont relent on the inclusion of these policies
 D) "How DARE you try to dictate to businesses!" should you try a top-down smackdown on demanding college degrees for menial labor
 E) Generally, trying to accomplish anything is like herding cattle

Meanwhile, people gotta make enough money to eat, business owners dont want to hire the drooling, slack-jawed idiot that knows how to throw a ball real good, but cant tie his shoelaces, and HR has to try to find some way to weed those people out of the hiring process without running foul of equal opportunity labor law.


Basically, the issue starts with primary education, and specifically, how the fed has mangled it with their bullshit implementation of funding allocation, penalization practices for underperforming schools, and pedantic metricification of "success!"


Even if the policies that CAUSED the problem are addressed, it will be 15 to 20 years before the system resets itself.  In that time, how do you ensure that employers do not demand degrees for bullshit reasons, so that people can actually, you know-- NOT STARVE TO DEATH-- should they decide not to seek higher education?

+1 to everything you just said.