Obama: The Fundamentals of our Economy are Sound

I call bullshit. Population 55+ with a college (or higher) degree ranges from 42% (Washington, DC), to 9.1% (West Virginia).

http://agingandwork.bc.edu/documents/SFS04_Education_2009-03-10.pdf

Why do you post lies that can be so easily checked?


And stay off your lawn, too! Good grief.

Not according to Thomas Sowell who attended that poor inner city school in New York. He was in grade school there in the 1940's and he was able to obtain test scores from his school and also the nearby white kids' school to make comparisons. As a product of that school, he knows what kind of education he got and he has written that it prepared him to compete with anybody. He now has at least one PhD. He has done exhaustive studies and written extensively on the status of education in the USA.

Admittedly that school I attended was in oil patch during the Permian Basin oil boom and was very well funded but by the private sector that also set the standards of what was expected of us kids to make the grade. When I transferred to Santa Fe for my junior and senior years, that school at that time was not as affluent or as well equipped but I still had some excellent teachers that required the very best of the kids in order to make the grade. Even though there were a lot more poor kids, the vast majority still earned--and I do mean earned--their highschool diplomas.

Simply put, the USA is too big and too diverse for a one-size fits all education, and the federal government is simply not up to the task of providing quality education. It should butt out and return it to the states and local communities so that our kids will be educated again.

Because it is not a lie regardless of what the demographics of Washington DC and West Virginia are now. I doubt you will find those demographics in those places to be any better now after billions of federal monies have been poured into those school districts. And I imagine the highschool graduation rates are a whole lot less. Why not check the Demographics of people who live in Long Island or Palo Alto or Mission Hills district Kansas City? Certainly the demographics of Lovington NM would not indicate a graduation rate or higher education rate now, but from that era, most of the kids did go on to college.

Of my parent's generation, high school graduates were much less too because a highschool diploma was not as necessary to make a living and they also were coping with a crushing depression. But they certainly were not a generation of uneducated people.

Are you claiming that people with higher levels of education have somehow died off faster?

Please show me a reference that at some point any age cohort of US citizens sported more than 50% with college degrees.

You've been caught in a mistake, Foxfyre. Your refusal to back down in the face of contrary evidence does not make me trust your reasoning skills, or education, very much.

OK - sorry about that.

No Drewdad. I have not. There were about 60 kids from that class in Lovington and I think about 50 of us are still alive. I didn't graduate there--my folks took state positions and made me move to Santa Fe my junior year--but since I had attended there since first grade, I have been included as a class member as if I had graduated there. Most of those 50 have stayed in touch, attend class reunions--we're having one in Dallas this coming July--so I know what almost all of them have done with their lives. And almost all did finish college.

I don't know what the record is in any other school or class but that one. I do know that it was achieved with no federal money at all, and I used it as an illustration only because I am 100% convinced that federal meddling in the public school system has done nothing to improve the schools and has been mostly a detriment.

Um, so now you're basing a blanket assertion (most of your generation now have college degrees) on the evidence of one school?

If I said that most of my generation now have college degrees, then yes I did not intend to say that. I intended to say that almost all those kids in that one class in Lovington NM do mostly have college degrees, and I only mentioned that because their opinion of the level of education they received was dismissed on the theory that they did not have college degrees. Going back to see what I said, I can see that I did misspeak if you separate the one comment from the discussion of the specific class I was referencing.

Forgive me if I do not take your report of the collective opinion of 60 people as evidence.

I didn't ask you to. I was discussing a topic and responding to the opinions of others who were offering not even anecdotal or empirical evidence, much less reference to actual studies. It is my opinion based on anecdotal and empirical evidence and doing quite a bit of reading on the subject that education has not improved and has significantly deteriorated the more the federal government has become involved. Dispute that if you can.

I do apologize to you though. I indeed made a mistake by appearing to refer to my entire generation rather than my group from that one highschool as mostly having college degrees and you were correct to call me on that. I didnt realize my mistake until I went back and reread what I wrote.

Lovington NM
Bachelor's degree no. 366 % 6.7
Master's, professional or doctorate degree no. 203 % 3.7
Source==US Census

Yeah that looks pretty typical. Wonder how it would look if the federal government had stayed out of it?

Even less. The percentage of people with college and graduate degrees has only risen since the Federal government got involved with schooling.

Cycloptichorn

But Fox learned her math skills in HS so therefore she must be correct when she claims that even if the highest % of any state over those over 55 having a college degree is 42% then clearly more than 50% of the total must have college degrees.

You didn't add those numbers up, did you Drew? Did you do something silly like assume the total was less than 42%? You should trust Fox on math. She is HS edumucated.

If I had claimed that you might have a point.

And your basis for the federal government involvement for this is?

I'm sorry, I misunderstand what you are asking here.

Cycloptichorn

i just can't bring myself to believe that every single thing about the federal government is bad. i know it's contrary to my southern heritage, but still...

i understand where you are coming from, foxy. i just don't agree. a graduating class of 60 is a rather small number of students, even for when i was in school. also, let's be honest, new mexico may be a beautiful place with a lot of great people, but it has been only recently that the population there has begun to take off.

there is a reason that i back the department of education; america isn't the loose conglomeration of isolated small towns that it once was. people leave their hometowns and move around much more than when even i was a kid.

there has to be some kind of accepted standard of education that will serve a kid from kentucky no matter where he/she goes in pursuit of work, adventure, happiness or all three.

if i had to rely on what the local marms of my elementary schools felt was the only nessecessary curriculum for making it in the world, i would have been sent forward with nothing more than the lord's prayer and a decent rendition of "you are my sunshine". i'm only half kidding.

but i'm not kidding when i tell you that i arrived in california at 18 years of age with nothing but a high school diploma and a belief that was good enough to get a decent gig. of course, the main reason i came here was to get the illusive record deal, but in the mean time even top raman (god bless 'em) cost money.

so imagine my surprise when i was repeatedly told that a high school diploma was about as useful as half a shovel. see, the good employers of hollywood had no way, even back then, to know exactly what a kentucky school was teaching as compared to an l.a. school. i was fortunate enough to meet a couple of older people who, for whatever reason, took a liking to me, mentored me in business and generally helped me get a leg up in businesses that wouldn't even accept that resume now. now, they have a better idea of what is what, and where. and a high school diploma will barely get you a mcjob now.

in any case, i get the distinct feeling comments voiced by most of those against the d.o.e. has more to do with social ideology rather than monetary or other concerns.

Yes my class/generation of that school was not typical nor, being in a booming oilpatch district at the time, our school was probably not typical on average compared to all schools everywhere. But it was my experience and the principle that I was attempting to explain has been validated by the extensive studies in U.S. education done by Dr. Sowell and others. Setting my experience aside, his experience in inner city New York in the 1940's was that he got an education there that equipped him to compete with anybody. That is no longer the case in the area in which he grew up.

I certainly don't think everything about government is bad. The federal government is constitutionally mandated and is necessary to monitor and regulate commonly shared ports, shorelines, air space, and interstate transportation and activities as a matter of necessity, practicality, and our common defense. The federal government is constitutionally mandated to provide a common defense, to make treaties with other governments, provide and regulate a common currency, and otherwise promote the general welfare in those areas that the states and the private sector could not do nearly as effectively or efficiently in a manner that promoted the general welfare.

I do think, however, the more the government assumes the power to do which is done more efficiently, effectively, and economically by the private sector, the less well off the people will be. The more power we hand over to the government to take from us whatever it wants, to restrict our freedoms to that which it says we may have, and to order us to do whatever it decides we should do, the more we diminish those things that has made this country so great. Such federally concentrated power and responsibility was not the intent for the federal government when the Constitution was written, and it should not be acceptable to anybody now.

(Also there is a plethora of highly successful people in business, commerce, industry, and the arts that did not have more than a highschool education, if that, and a much higher number who did not finish college. Bill Gates comes to mind for instance. That should not be an excuse for people not finishing highschool now though and not going to college if they can as so many fields usually do require a degree to get a foot in the door.)