BF2S Forums Design a new college system

Jay wrote:

I don't have any inferiority complex uzi, I've been rubbing shoulders with the wealthy since I was 14. Some things I picked up, like the importance of choosing a career which allows you to be able to afford to send your kids to good schools, and other stuff I've mocked. There's nothing sadder than old money types that hold onto past family glory, which is what you seem to be glorifying. Poor people that the wealthier people pity and snigger at behind their backs while they try to maintain the lifestyle of the country club. Whatever.

Besides, who are you trying to impress anyway? Where are you trying to fit in? So much social anxiety you have. Do you really think people will judge you based on the books you've read? If they do, why would you subject yourself to it? You really are a strange duck uzi.

i have no social anxieties. i come from an upper-middle class family. i went to one of the most prestigious schools in the country. i'm doing a subject simply because i love it and find it extremely intellectually stimulating, with zero real worry or consideration for "how much money" it will net me, or hw much of a "career" it will give me. i'm doing it because i enjoy it. how can i enjoy it so recklessly? clearly because i have zero social anxieties, jay. if i was worried about making it to the monied-class (which i'm not), i'd be doing an economics or management degree, so i could aim for that middle-management sweet spot.

ironically with your aims, if you save up all that money and send your kid to a good school, he could very likely turn out like me. how that would kill you. a youth born of choice and freedom to indulge his intellectual curiosities! what a dangerous thing.

I think happiness is posting on an Internet forum while I'm supposed to be working

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

I think happiness is posting on an Internet forum while I'm supposed to be working

Happiness is being off from work the day after Easter

Jay wrote:

I don't have any inferiority complex uzi, I've been rubbing shoulders with the wealthy since I was 14.

oh and how come, if you're such an arriviste into the circles of the classy and wealthy, you had to rely on the g.i. bill and a bunch of government aid in order to complete your education? sounds tres tres déclassement to me.

Jay wrote:

Uzique wrote:

Jay wrote:

Honestly, more power to him. As long as he's not short changing his own kids, he can do whatever he wants. I won't support him beyond paying for college.

i'm supporting myself now after college, too. doesn't that make me your model child? maybe this is why you have such issues with me. it's very convoluted and freudian.

No, because you're being a completely selfish twit pursuing a path that won't allow your own kids the same opportunities you had.

I think you're being a completely selfish twit holding a political view that won't allow everyone else's kids the same opportunities as your own.

Which is why it bothers me that you're making it more difficult on your children when you've had every opportunity in the world not to. You don't give a fuck about anyone but uzi.

I had to deal with someone just like you all weekend, my fiancee's drunkard brother. He spent Saturday night haranguing his father because at 27, he's still resentful that his parents never bought him a car. They spent over $100k on his education at a private college, and tens of thousands more sending him to the best private schools before that. He just lost his menial job in IT customer service and decided to rage at everyone all weekend. Yesterday, after forcing us to drive him to his shitty one bedroom apartment in the industrial part of Queens, he threatened to break his sisters nose after she asked him not to get her freshly washed laundry dirty. I pulled over and let him walk back to his moms house.

I don't have time for selfish and entitled people uzi, it's why I've never liked you (or Macbeth, who is also squandering his family's wealth). But please, do go on about why the taxpayer should replace your father as benefactor.

Jay wrote:

Which is why it bothers me that you're making it more difficult on your children when you've had every opportunity in the world not to. You don't give a fuck about anyone but uzi.

I had to deal with someone just like you all weekend, my fiancee's drunkard brother. He spent Saturday night haranguing his father because at 27, he's still resentful that his parents never bought him a car. They spent over $100k on his education at a private college, and tens of thousands more sending him to the best private schools before that. He just lost his menial job in IT customer service and decided to rage at everyone all weekend. Yesterday, after forcing us to drive him to his shitty one bedroom apartment in the industrial part of Queens, he threatened to break his sisters nose after she asked him not to get her freshly washed laundry dirty. I pulled over and let him walk back to his moms house.

I don't have time for selfish and entitled people uzi, it's why I've never liked you (or Macbeth, who is also squandering his family's wealth). But please, do go on about why the taxpayer should replace your father as benefactor.

gee whizz i must be just like him because i think people should be allowed to study arts and humanities! thanks for the meaningless anecdote. i'm sorry some parts of your life suck. don't know what it has to do with me though.

oh and how will i be making anything difficult on my children? academics get paid very handsomely here. they lead very upper-middle class lives. the children of almost all academics i know are put through private schools and given a very great start in life, because... quelle surprise!... academics value education. funny that. i have no idea where you're getting the idea from that because i have an interest in literature, i'm confining my children forever to the poorhouse.

Last edited by Uzique (2012-04-09 09:51:46)

Uzique wrote:

jay doesn't think that's the case, shocking, he thinks only certain education should be made available to certain people, based on its individual economic benefit and 'RoI'. i.e. what he basically means is that poor kids like him should be given every government hand-out he can take so he can study engineering. it's all just one big act of evasive self-validation. and then he has the temerity to mention that me, in defense of all higher-education completely without discrimination, suffers social anxieties. lol.

No, I said that if your 'social mobility' argument is anything more than meaningless buzzwords you'd advocate a scholarship system that would allow people to become socially mobile. You then turned around and said 'well, social mobility has nothing to do with money'. Lol.

All of those terms are watered down. If a poll was taken of Americans, 90% of them would consider themselves to be middle class. I've known people making hundreds of thousands of dollars that considered themselves just 'upper middle class'. That's why I scoff at the term.

Uzique wrote:

jay doesn't think that's the case, shocking, he thinks only certain education should be made available to certain people, based on its individual economic benefit and 'RoI'. i.e. what he basically means is that poor kids like him should be given every government hand-out he can take so he can study engineering. it's all just one big act of evasive self-validation. and then he has the temerity to mention that me, in defense of all higher-education completely without discrimination, suffers social anxieties. lol.

Having switched from sciences to humanities there's something I did notice though.

In the sciences, when a faculty member explained to me the research that he was doing, I always got the point. In 99% of the cases at least, the few times I didn't get it was because it was too difficult for me to understand what the respective faculty member was actually doing. Nevertheless, research in these fields always has a purpose of sorts and in almost all of the cases, it helps technological advancement which in turn translates itself into more comfortable living, cheaper stuff or progress in some far off but productive goal (such as fusion).

In the humanities, sometimes I really wonder what the point is in what people are doing. Some guy I know is writing a biography on some insignificant member of Parliament who lived in the 1920s. Does this serve any purpose? Not really. He didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about his research either. Besides this there's a lot of "research" being done in the social sciences and fringes of psychology that make you seriously question whether it actually has any use whatsoever. Not only that, there are courses and studies available that don't make sense at all.

Even though research in the humanities only costs a fraction of what research in the sciences costs, there's still a price tag attached to it and sometimes there's no "RoI" to speak of. I did state that the government should make it so that anyone can pursue any sort of education they want, but the reality is that there's no unlimited pool of funding that can be tapped into to support any quest for knowledge someone might have. Hence I said... the government should try to the best of its abilities. If there's a shortage of money, choices have to be made.

You can argue over budget allocation and state that funding for some other ministry ought to be cut rather than that of education, but, given that the government exists for the betterment and safety of the collective, how can you justify throwing money at the essentially worthless pursuits of an individual? That money could instead be used for the good of the collective.

Last edited by Shocking (2012-04-09 10:12:32)

Jay wrote:

Jenspm wrote:

Jay wrote:

No, because you're being a completely selfish twit pursuing a path that won't allow your own kids the same opportunities you had.

I think you're being a completely selfish twit holding a political view that won't allow everyone else's kids the same opportunities as your own.

Says the guy forcing the taxpayers of his home country to pay the international student rate so he can play pranks in Scotland. People like you are precisely the reason I don't want public education. You are a complete waste of my money.

My country does not pay the international student rate. It pays £4k pr year. The rest is given through cheap loans.

The £4k grant is given because:
a) Having citizens who have studied/lived abroad is good (bringing in ideas from overseas, for one, and not to mention cultural tolerance, diversity, etc), so we encourage it.
b) I'm not using the universities at home, so am not inflicted a cost there.
c) Equal opportunity - your parents wealth should not at all determine where you can go to university. Connected to this is social diversity.

Which is why the system is so great. No matter what your parents earn, think or want, you are completely free to study whatever you like, wherever you want. And guess what? It helps our economy as well. And society. And culture. And academia.

Uzique wrote:

we've already had this about 5 pages ago. the point is that the academic and theoretical research done in science/math is often just as abstruse and esoteric as in the humanities. of course humanities research has no technological benefit - well done. but that's not the only purpose of academia and research. we don't have universities solely for the function of inventing more stuff or boosting material wellbeing. they are there because they catalogue and study the entire corpus of western knowledge - culture and intangible things included. if you just had one side of the picture you would have an entirely deficient country and academy.

Furthering social advancement by contributing to cultural or intangible things is not something I have a problem with - it's for the good of the collective. The tricky part is trying to distinguish between what does benefit this purpose and what doesn't. There's a lot of 'useless fluff' in the humanities which doesn't, the 'abstruse and esoteric' research in the sciences you're talking about, deserves to be cut as well (imo).

I'm really not trying to argue that the sciences are the only fields of study worthy of public funding, history, for example, is of equal importance to me.

Last edited by Shocking (2012-04-09 10:24:25)

Jenspm wrote:

Jay wrote:

Jenspm wrote:

I think you're being a completely selfish twit holding a political view that won't allow everyone else's kids the same opportunities as your own.

Says the guy forcing the taxpayers of his home country to pay the international student rate so he can play pranks in Scotland. People like you are precisely the reason I don't want public education. You are a complete waste of my money.

My country does not pay the international student rate. It pays £4k pr year. .

Jay knows how that is. He did abuse a government program designed for the poor after all. He got $6k out of it.