Student protests in London lead to violence

"not everyone can get or deserves to get a college education. "

Everyone deserves an education. Piss off.

^ Try including the "college" modifier, as the quoted material did, then try saying that.

Advanced education isn't absolutely required to function in the modern world. Can it help? Depending on the specifics, yes. Will you (generic "you") wind up destitute, face-down in an alley with a bag-covered bottle in your grubby hand  ^*

because of a lack of it? Not hardly.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Not everyone needs one, but anyone who wants one should "deserve" one.

In the Dominican Republic, where my family is from, there is a particularly nasty system that goes on towards keeping poor Haitian immigrants working on plantations. Sugarcane harvesting is back breaking work that usually goes a full day without a lunch break. Immigrants who start work don't get paid until the end of their first payment period (usually a little over a month), so they have to borrow from moneylenders who specifically cater to the sugarcane workers, since as noncitizens I don't think they can get loans from banks (plus, the Haitians are firmly at the bottom of Dominican society and treating them like crap is expected). As such, the workers have to take loans in order to feed and house themselves that first month, and the rates set by the moneylenders tend to keep the workers in debt perpetually. The funny thing is that the moneylenders tend to be owners of or investors in the sugarcane plantations, or frequently close friends with them. Ditto with the businesses that sell food in regions where Haitian sugarcane workers live. I know plantation managers that have given their workers a lunch break and provided them with food, leading to 50% increases in productivity - only to be abandoned by their investors, publicly denounced by the moneylenders and local politicians, and eventually driven out of business by competitors. This is seen as a fair fate for someone who "sides with the Haitians".

Now, in the 'developed' West, we've had a deflation of the bachelor's degree to the point where it's not a guarantee of getting any job at all, much less a good one. Trying to get a living wage without your college education is even tougher. As tuition fees go up, more and more graduates end up entering the workforce in severe debt that takes a significant portion of their working lives to pay off. Now economic times are pretty tough right now, and graduates are competing for less and less jobs with less and less useful degrees while they need to pay off more and more debt. There's a political position that states the best way to get through these tough economic times is to cut programs like education, because we can't have the government spending too much and the consequences of cutting education are supposed to be negligible. They'll have to do less research and tuition will go up, but they can just work harder and make it through, right?

Makes one think.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

I hate to break it to you, Josef, but until you're 25 you'll be earning just enough to see your loan balance increase year on year. Undergraduate degrees are worth very little these days, thanks to the push to give them to any idiot who can write their name.

I'm living at home and have funds set aside. Also, all of my friends are away and I don't need a car, I can comfortably live on about £10 a week for travel? I think I should be okay ish.

I know more about the college system than you can possibly imagine. What it's like to work while attending, to pay out of pocket because your loans didn't cover enough or a particular semester, to know what it's like to know that just because I'm not a minority I get no special treatment, to know what it's like to apply to multiple colleges have to sort out which I want/can go to, to know what it is like to fail a course and retake it, to know what it's like to fill out forms filled with enough legalese or phrasing like it to make you cross eyed and much much more. I didn't spend the greater part of 6 years of my life chasing and getting both an associates and bachelors degree and 2 certifications only to not know a thing about college life or the system it works in.

These people protesting think a college education is a fucking gift, a right when the reality is it is anything but. A college education is for those who choose to do it and choose again to do well enough to earn their degrees. Wanting one isn't good enough, you have to want to work for it.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

edited 11th Dec '10 5:31:50 PM by storyyeller

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No you don't Tom, because you are not British. You may know more about your own college system, but over here things are slightly different. So stop claiming knowledge that you do not have. Please.

edited 11th Dec '10 5:31:20 PM by JosefBugman

So then tell me, what's the difference between American colleges and the British system beyond the government holding your hand like an infant? Anything at all?

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

^^^^^^ Sounds exactly like the American southeast a hundred years ago.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

Tom. I would advise you to not say stuff like that, it is inflamatory and none condusive to arguement or debate.

Essentially the differences are manifold, for a start the years you spend there are less (3 instead of four) you have to purchase and rent your own housing (most of the time) during the last 2 years. The government grants both "Maintainance" and "Student" loans, the latter is set by the university and is used to help pay for things the university needs. The former is for living off if you have no other means of support (i.e. Food, rent etc). The Maintainance one is usually paid back fairly quickly, and is useful because it allows people to focus on their studies and other important secondary skills (socialising, building a C.V. through extra curicular activities, cooking, cleaning etc) without working constantly in a city they do not know for bosses that will be unwilling to put up with them leaving or having differing work schedules.

It's depressing to see Americans throw the "yes, this is a land of opportunity" idea in the trash, Tom.

Gosh.

edited 11th Dec '10 5:39:37 PM by RadicalTaoist

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

I would imagine one important difference being a smaller number of available bank loans/scholarships, since the government there subsidizes a lot of the cost. I'd imagine their system just isn't built around private scholarships and such.

Whether the private or government system works better is a good question, but probably off-topic.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

^^ Sorry Tom but in our universities we learn that if you want to take part in a debate and have people listen to you, you have to educate yourself first. If you want to talk to us, you have to prove yourself first.

Of course, I've been reading your forum contributions for quite some time now, so you've already proven to me that your opinions don't matter and I'm not going to listen to you.

I get the feeling that the target of the anger has changed over the past few weeks. The first protest was done at Tory HQ, now there's a lot of focus on the Lib Dems. Largely this is because they are the most noticeable opponents to the fees and now the plan is theirs. Yet it is really obvious here that the Universities' funding is being cut by a certain amount no amtter what, because of the cuts over the whole system and there's only one place they can make the money up from.

Everybody officious (well, the Labour party and the NUS) who opposes this still accepts that there has to be some money raising method. They talk about the Graduate Tax as though it is fairer and they put it forward as their proposal but to me what that means is that the only real effective debate I can have is not on the cap amount but the system that we have.

I looked over the idea of a Graduate Tax, saw the con points of a pure income tax supplement, saw the proposals for adjusting it, saw the more National Insurance Contribution like idea, saw the pros and cons list for that, saw suggested improvements for that and by the end...you get the proposed system. (Roughly. There's a lot of confusion out there and it's hard to a protester seriously when you aren't sure you and he are working off the same fact sheet, especially if you aren't sure yours isn't right.)

*Wearin ma mod Rolex*

Thorn 14, you do not get to tell another troper to piss off. Major Tom has as much right to participate as you do, and your rudeness is neither helpful nor allowed under the site rules.

Major Tom, kindly drop the condescending language. The British college culture is indeed distinct from the American one, and your dismissive references to teats and infants are not going to get you listened to or endear you to anybody.

*Mod Rolex off*

edited 11th Dec '10 9:06:52 PM by BobbyG

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Well this certainly puts a damper on the education there. Haven't the police there figured out that their tactics lead to things like these?

You got some dirt on you. Here's some more!

There's also the fact that they're willing to fight for their rights and stand against getting fucked by the system

France was the population in general being pissed over the retirement age gap, Greece was the population in general being pissed off @ being fucked by the IMF, I don't know what's happening with Germany. It's the populace in general. I HOPE in the UK the discontent spreads from the Students.....

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Most of those 'black' scholarships are for people for a set major/field, OR go to a 4 yea institution. In a lot of cases it's BOTH. Think I'm wrong? Go to the UNCF website. I've looked them up before. FFS I don't even get financial aid or a subsidized college rate because my family "makes too much". BULLSHIT, I was raised by a single mother & grandparents, and am a black male.

Also, things like 'you don't go to a set college, often a 'historically black college or university'. Or the fact that those scholarships are gobbled up by other people (hey, you're going to a black college/university & theres plenty of overachievers in some of those places). Or that a lot of the sites are DEAD/turn up 404s. Or that the scholarships are like 500 dollars or some shit, not a full tuition or anything approaching full tuition and you hope you get enough shit to add up.

tl;dr just because you are black or hispanic does NOT give you like 'over9000 free monies' Spoilering to prevent a derailment, Cirno xD

EDIT:

they USED to - e.g. some people said the reason the UK did not heavily join in the 1848 revolution was due to british police not carrying guns, which intimidated the mainland europeans and made them more willing to revolt.

the game

edited 11th Dec '10 11:45:31 PM by BalloonFleet

WHASSUP....... ....with lolis!

Damn, Major Tom, I enjoy reading your posts in the military thread and suchlike but here you're just talking condescending, ill-informed crap from a perspective that is incompatible with understanding the problems under discussion here.

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

In their defence, they did act in the best interests; I believe the general idea was to keep the students hooligans from rioting everywhere, since allowing them to go where they pleased would probably be pretty bad anyway, especially if some of the participants were looking for a fight.

They send a thin blue line to the protests at Milibank and then there's people smashing into Tory HQ and getting onto the roof and throwing shit and a perceived failure. So they send more out and..they still smash things up and make a mess. There's 10000 people protesting, 500 with an intent to riot. The fact that 500 want to throw things at you gets police procedure to change to one that gets the 9500 others riled up. 43 protesters and 12 police were injured and I would hope that riot gear improves your chances by three fold so it wasn't exactly a mass put down.

Across the US, budget shortfalls are leading to cutbacks in community college funding (see here, for instance), so that a type of education traditionally available to anyone who could pay the (nominal) fee is now becoming harder and harder to get.

The question for both the US and the UK is: What exactly do you plan to accomplish by having a less educated populace? Talk about winning in the short term and losing in the long term.

Getting reelected. Duh.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

If one would consider the uneducated another race, they do want geniuses, they want genuses... sorry, I just wanted to use that.

And I believe the idea of the budget cuts is to, in general, cut back in the short term to reduce the deficit to bolster the economy, and when the economy is back on track, begin re-investing in public services. Or that's what I'd like to think, anyway. The alternative is that the Tory party are a bunch of educated men behaving like five year olds, and I'd rather not think that about my government.

Then again, our populace accidentally voted in the LibCon government into power.