If the student doesn’t obtain skills that make them more valuable per hour than the legally mandated minimum wage rate, they simply won’t be hired. It doesn’t make business sense to pay more for something than the value you get in return. Schools are having a very hard time producing students whose skills are more valuable than the cost of hiring them. This is compounded by the facts that labor is quite expensive in this country, compared to that in China or India, and that the federally mandated minimum wage keeps employees who are willing to work for less than the minimum wage from competing with the Chinese or Indian workers.

Also, when I see a college spending money on lavish remodeling projects instead of on the core business of educating students, it does not make me more interested in increasing pell grants, scholarships, or allowing tuition increases. From my perspective, it looks like they already have plenty of money that they are just choosing to use ineffectively. When I see teenagers going to school and learning more about stealing cars than about job skills, it doesn’t make me more interested in funding schools. To me, it looks like providing the location for them to meet is just increasing the chance I’ll lose my car.

So basically:
-School needs to be provided to those who both want to go to school and can make use of the education.
-School should be optional at best for those who don’t want to be there.
-There should not be public funding for students to go to classes that they are highly unlikely to benefit from.
-The benefit should exceed the cost of providing the service. (This is the real reason the government is having debt problems. It borrows money to pay for things that won’t help the economy or even help repay the loan. The borrowed money is gone, but the problems that existed when the money was borrowed still exist, and now we have the additional problem of how to repay the loan.)

As a side note to the last item in that list, I would really rather see the benefit of the classes be increased to make them worth the money, than see the funding get cut. It is money well spent, but only if we are getting something of equal or greater value than the money we spend. Knowledge is valuable, but $ 130 for a textbook that is not even as good as a $ 20 Complete Idiot’s Guide is the kind of ripoff colleges are becoming notorious for. Many of my college classes consisted of mainly the textbook and two exams. I don’t know why we had to pay an extra $ 200 each for a building to meet in and who-knows-how-much for the professor who didn’t add any value to the class. I really think I get more from CIGs, some of which I can even find at the library for free, than I got from a lot of my college classes.

I really think that anything related to school that does not directly translate to a possible line on the student’s resume should not be publicly funded. I’m willing to accept a few links such as art class increases creativity and therefore helps critical thinking, so this shouldn’t be a terrible hardship to accomplish. But a line has to be drawn somewhere. Paying for over a decade of school that does not result in the student becoming gainfully employed is ridiculous.

It isn’t really that “Cons” want to kill off education; they just want to see the benefits outweigh the cost, instead of hearing people say that going to school leads to a good job, then ignoring everything else that costs money and has to go right between school and the job.

Go look at the federal education budget yourself and see what increases go with which presidents.

Why did they skip school?

Because a few days without classes are better than a life of low budget teachers.

You think they don’t care now?

You think whatever you’re told.

that’s a good one! Seriously? That doesn’t even make sense, where’s your reference? Are you quoting your old boss because you carry some deep-rooted upset about him and you assume he was a conservative or what?

Unbelieveable- what hole did you pull this information out of? Make-believe conspiracies make me smile:)

Bullying is child abuse done by children to other children. When adults acquiesce to that, they are passive facilitators.

I am not on the side of those who think that the bullied child just has to toughen up. Too many children feel terrorized and helpless when adults ignore bullying or minimize its importance.

In addition, allowing this behavior to go on encourages some children to grow up to be bullies who will harm others in even more dangerous ways when they are adults. That could be the training ground for those with the social attitudes of a dictator.

Parents who tell their kids to toughen up may also be encouraging them to be bullies victimizing other kids. Parents should talk to their children about how they relate to other kids but not encourage them to be abusive.

Look at a graph of education spending in the US over any given time period… let’s say.. 40 years or so… It shoots straight for the sky… Then look at a graph of the performance of the schools during that time period… It’s a flat line…

If there is no return on an “investment” in education, it is mal-investment… Same goes for infrastructure spending…

This is just one offshoot of this generation’s “special little snowflake” syndrome, where people believe that they are entitled to ghastly amounts of money any time anything bad ever happened to them.