I like this idea, and if they can actually follow through, it’d be great.
What classes did you take that was literally just a review of high school?
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It does do you good if your wages are keeping up with inflation (or the Delta makes up for the decreased value of your loan).
Almost every classes that you take in the first two year of college is little more than a review of high school. Particularly government and history classes (which all public school requires), “college algebra”, even precalculus, foreign language, etc… Those are taught in high school, should have been taught well in high school. Instead you waste no less than 30 semester hours on them. All majors have to take them, doesn’t matter if it’s useless liberal arts or engineering degrees.
Just for any given degrees at UT Austin you can strip out at least 60 semester hours from the degree if you excluded these high school review classes. Not to say we should just spend 2 years to get a bachelor’s but without AP credits you actually need 5 years to graduate if you were starting from scratch (and taking a reasonable course load).
I think those classes should be replaced with classes that has to do with the degree you are studying. That means 60 hours of engineering if you study engineering, and you shouldn’t even be taking those useless liberal arts classes. If written communication is so important then some of the classes can be essay based, for example do some experiment, write research reports documenting it. Practical experience. Not just filling in some bubbles on some scantron sheet.
Not all engineers needs to minor in English literature… but too often you almost had to minor in English literature regardless of your major.
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I’d prefer a bit more focus on grammar and literacy myself.
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So… looking at UT’s site, things like regular old algebra and precalculus are not exactly generally required - they’re required if you’re not ready for the college level classes. Looks like at UT they require a single math class, and you can take things like data science or a regular calc class. There does appear to be a couple basic history classes required, but after that, you have a choice of some electives that I’m sure aren’t high school equivalent. So if you have 2 years of high school classes, uh, yeah,.you’re either doing a lot of remedial work, or purposely sandbagging.
IIRC, you previously defined reasonable as 13 hours - that’s the MINIMUM required to be considered full time. Sorry, but no.
A whopping 6 hours of English comp and core writing is required. Most people would be well served with more.
Yep. I work with a lot of engineers who can’t write for shit. They’re useless on proposals, and don’t do well making compelling presentations. I’d probably require 12+ credits of English / communications at the college level id I were writing an engineering curriculum. Hell, a screen writing class where they learn to tell a story would be seriously useful for a lot of people.
I’m sorry that was your experience. I went to a small but notable liberal arts university in the Midwest and I never felt like I was repeating anything I learned in high school. None of the “core classes” I was expected to take at my university would have been offered at any high school of any caliber. Statistics was much more in-depth and fascinating than the AP class I took in high school. Language classes had placement tests — if you knew the content, you moved to the level that fit your ability. My AP tests didn’t mean anything for being able to skip core classes because my university didn’t require said classes. Looks like you ended up in a school that didn’t fit your needs.
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More rhetorical advocacy. If I scream when I see the bill, can I sue?
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Well engineers aren’t writers. They should stick to engineering, not writing. There are always ways to make up for lack of writing skill, and probably all these research in AI would mean that writing skills become less important as computers can fill in the blank. But most companies have a liaison that acts as the bridge between management and engineers, because we prefer engineers be great at engineering.
We have tons of writers out there, but not so many engineers.
Engineers spend a shit ton of writing, as they should. Doing good technical work, but not being able to document and communicate it doesn’t do jack shit in most cases (the exception being if you’re working something small by yourself, for yourself, go to town).
Yea, maybe some day. But not even close right now.
I’m an engineer, and have been an engineering manager. I’ve done consulting at dozens of companies. You’re just not correct.
Edit: just in the last 2 weeks, I’ve had year end briefs on 2 projects that I’m PI on- on the first, one of my junior engineers briefed my exec vp and the president of another large company. In the second, I had 7 engineers do a director level brief with representatives from 4 different customer communities.
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Well that never stopped anyone on this board before. 
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Student loan payments on hold til May 1st now. Thanks Obama.
He was getting so much pressure to do that from his party. They would have gotten slaughtered at mid terms imo if Biden didn’t extend it. But there’s still the looming question of loan forgiveness. This at least buys them some time.
I’m so tired of flip-flopping and politicians not doing what they say they’re going to do. Either forgive loans or don’t. Elizabeth Warren already confirmed the president has the authority to do it. I don’t know why Biden can’t have the spine to follow through on his “promise”
Maybe a forever deferral. Make it into a yearly renew. Been two years almost already.
What candidate would touch it?
Larry Summers tweets:
Judged purely in termsof economic impacts, the Administrations decision to extend student loan moratorium is highly problematic.
And by problematic, he means “it’s a problem for you fucking peasants, not me.”
When he resigned [from Harvard] in 2006, he received a $1million mortgage and nearly $200,000 in an education loan for his children. His mortgage comes with a lower than market interest rate and the education loans are interest free.
Of course, your average university president has to be paid at a rate which can enable him to socially hobnob with the football coach (not at that level, of course), which trickles down to all the recently hired Associate Assistant Administrators for the Project Development for 21st Century Dynamic Implementation of Forward-Looking Goals. After all, you can’t expect them to rub shoulders with the grotty adjuncts and grad students who make less than minimm wage for actually teaching the courses.
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In a new analysis, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimated canceling $50,0000 in student loan debt would forgive the full balance for nearly 30 million federal student loan borrowers. The average forgiveness would be more than $23,800 per borrower. The move would cost about $904 billion. But some of that money, advocates point out, has already been out the door for decades.
Looking maybe at an announcement before August and mid-term elections.
- I’ll believe it when I see it
- eff this. I paid off 18k in federal student loans instead of focusing on my investments because I listend to the “you can’t build wealth when you have debt” folks instead of considering stock market returns vs. student loan interest rates. There’s going to be a lot of angry Americans in the same boat as me
Goddamn you Joe Biden! Trump would have forgiven all student loans plus made them pay all the loans back.
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