Education Ideas

Last week an educational academic lobby group met with Klein to give him surplus recommendations. The suggestions were all zany and leftwing. Nuff said there. But two of the suggestions were especially botherersome, one from where it came from the other for its chance to be implemented; I will discuss the dangerous idea first.

1) Give students the option of linking their tuition repayment to their post education salary.

This idea is dangerous, because it would fall under the guise of pragmatic--which means not only are lefties are in favor of the idea, but so are naïve individualists. On the surface it makes sense. Determine what a person pays back based on the income level he achieves with his post secondary degree. The thinking is that between the people who achieve high earnings after school and the people that don’t, tuition repayment will average out so enough money will be recouped to repay tuition in its entirety. Sounds fair, but stop and think about this. Would industrious docs, lawyers, engineers, nurses and entrepreneurs sign up for this payment option. No. Being ambitious they would do the calculations, figure out their expected earnings, and opt for the best financial deal for them-- which would be a boring old loan.

Now who would opt into this payment option. Yes, you’re right, the un-ambitious, students that know they’ll go back to bartending, backpacking, living in ma and pa’s basement, the pot smoking activists, multiple degree getters (for the sake of avoiding real life--we all know these people… degree four and a walnut sized brain). These are the people that will sign up for the program--students that know they will never capitalize on their degrees. And the program will end up needing massive subsidization as it will be running huge deficits as it depends on loafers for its financial support.

Like all social engineering projects it has a major flaw; essentially the government is betting on its ability to predict future earnings better than the people that will do the future earning. think about it; Who can predict future earnings better than the government? Yes, students themselves.

2) Coming Saturday-- the idea of mandatory post secondary education

-Angry Roughneck