Unless we can generate some leadership that's capable of thinking outside the box you may well be right.

I'm rather inclined to think that such people will eventually emerge however.

When the stakes are high enough, seemingly insoluble problems have a way of getting solved.

And those who solve the unsolvable are featured prominently in the history books . . . including those that have yet to be written.

The game ain't over yet :2 cents:

kinda like building roads makes costs go up, yet that ends up creating revenue via taxes with the businesses that use those roads

so.. investment point still stands?

So, why is it costing $200b for 1 million students? That is $200k

Daughter is on the post 9/11 bill, serve the country, then have the benefits.

I think America could use a lot more educated people, not a lot less.

It's over 10 years.

Why the fuck would you want to give free education to people in the US when the educational system and standards AND expectations of students are so far below other developed nations? That's like giving away free weight loss pills at McDonalds

If you actually read it , it said ?ultimately knock more than one million students off? the program over the next 10 years.

More than is more than a million.

Throw out the baby with the bathwater? Higher education should be free. The U.S. doesn't need its future to be filled with even less educated people. It isn't an either/or answer. We need to improve performance along with making it easier to gain an education.

NOTHING is free. Like all other things, someone has to pay for it, while its poorly managed by the government and most others abuse it because its there to abuse.

Higher education is HIGHLY overrated. Our economy is driven by high school and college dropouts... Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Peter Jackson, David Geffen .... etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. A very large % of the worlds richest people either didn't go, dropped out or didn't graduate college.

We have some of the shittiest education in the world and are the only world economic super power. Our current educational system churns out retards like it was a point of national pride.

Highly unrealistic to attempt to correlate economic and financial success with higher education.

GFY Political discussions.
http://i.imgur.com/oCJrl.gif

That's just bullshit. I'm sure USA can save money on other things for sure, not cut education.

I brought this up earlier. Maybe we should kill it because it is so inefficient.

Pigshit.

I'm just guessing here, but I would assume that at least some of the money set aside for the Pell Grant goes to administrative costs. If it is like any other government function then it is likely bloated and expensive.

It looks like the max you can get from Pell Grant is $5,500. I assume that is per year.

One of the problems with it is that any accredited school can allow students to get Pell Grant money. Millions in Pell Grant dollars end up being fed to these crappy diploma mill schools that like University of Phoenix that churn out under-qualified students and have enormous drop out rates. 40% of the students that start at these schools drop out within the first 6 months. The school does't care so long as they get paid.

Maybe they need to cut the Pell Grant money to these shitty schools and focus on giving it to Community Colleges and Universities.

If 5.5k is the most you can get there is some huge bloatedness going on. Dump it.

EXACTLY, why the fuck should I have to pay for a complete strangers education? Right and left both have overstepped what government should do with it's taxpayers dollars.

Assume you can get $5,500 per year and the average student gets this for three years. that is $16,500 per student times 1 million affected students that means of that 200 billion only about 16.5 billion actually end up in students hands. . . either I don't understand how the system works or something is terribly, terribly wrong with the system and I have a feeling that is likely the later.

You know the answer to the question. Administrative costs. Fuck that. That is what Obama is going to bury us with.

Quit assuming the math is wrong, or based on your assumptions if you're too lazy to do the research. If it matters to you, then you should at least make an effort to break it down factually and accurately. Don't make assumptions based on someone else's GFY speculation.

The actual amount Paul Ryan wants to cut is $170 billion.
9 million students utilizing the Pell Grant.
A maximum of $5,550 per student per year.

The 2010-2011 program awarded $35,676,927,369 to over 9 million students for an average of ~$3,964 per student.

Over 1/4th of all students in the U.S. take advantage of the Pell Grant program. Almost 80% of students receiving bachelor's degrees, use Pell Grants. Due to rising costs of tuition, the Grant only covers a small portion, about 1/3rd the costs and most of these students will take out student loans.

See above. Not only that, this isn't an Obama thing. Obama just signed a Pell Grant cut into law last year.

so this one cut is going to do massive damage to whatever recovery the US hopes to achieve over the next few decades?

unless of course, the plan is to turn the US into the newest 3rd world country

You cannot spend your way out of debt.

Countries have big problems cutting their costs to get out of debt.

Countries can't tax cut out of debt.

You can't wait for an economy to turn around.

The only way for a country to get out of debt is to produce and sell overseas.

The problem is telling people that you will be putting more money in their pockets, even if in the long term it doesn't happen, will get votes.

You need more companies like these at the top to be American http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ies_by_revenue cutting education is the stupidest move in the list of stupid moves.

Our masters don't want us educated.
They don't educate slaves, do they? (or did they?)

Education for all is a wonderful concept and a free society would want everyone to be the best they can be. That includes education through college.

Without cheap/free education for all only the rich will get a college level education and therefore create a caste system. As it was in the not so distant past.

In the USA education is going down hill faster than you can imagine anyways. My son is 11 and in the sixth grade. He's been in private schools 'till last year.
I just found out that they no longer teach cursive writing in public school in Florida.

That's right all you guys saying that you don't need an education to succeed. You guys made some cash and you did it most likely through your own companies. Goog for you.
I bet you can at least write in cursive.............. I bet you learned it in a public school..............

Just try to get a good, well paying job for a company you don't own. (and not porn) If you don't have a college degree they won't even look at your application.

FREE/LOW COST EDUCATION FOR ALL IS PARAMOUNT TO A FREE SOCIETY. (I ain't saying we are a free society these days either, but that another topic)

Cut education and build more prisons

This sounds like a WIN!

Sad thing is............... They have. :error

There is no doubt that is where this country is headed. Remove education from the equation, and we should see an explosion of the prison workforce.

?The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners? work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,? says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being ?an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.?

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. ?This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.?

Your statement is misleading.

"President Barack Obama increased Pell grants in his stimulus bill -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The president then proposed indexing Pell Grants for inflation and increasing the Pell to $5,975 by 2020, but Congress never followed up to enact that into law.

When Republicans took the House majority in 2011, the first piece of legislation passed included a $5.7 billion cut to Pell Grants, though the bill never made it through the Senate. Later, however, Pell Grants were cut during the debt ceiling debacle in the summer of 2011.

But in the Budget Control Act of 2011 -- a deal reached between Congress and the president to raise the debt ceiling -- overall Pell Grant funding was boosted."

The cool thing, is in a few years the people on Unemployment won't be able to spell it.

Ahh never mind, we probably won't have Unemployment Insurance much longer either...

Oh man, I hate to think of what 4 more years of Obama would be like. He's divided our country and vilified big business. He's at war with Republicans and all the businesses that built our country. That's a BAD thing, people. Use your brains. Also, the unemployment rate is the same as it was 4 years ago. Obama's fiscal policies and attack on big businesses have not helped to create jobs. Unfortunately, he's such a genius with rhetoric and delegating blame, that I bet he'll have no problem getting re-elected. (and yes i know this post is slightly off topic. I've never given a shit about that though. That's the beauty of GFY, lol!)

that you blame him for being at war with the republicans sounds totally crazy from an outside point of view

i think in the rest of the world we have more or less the consent that over the last 4 years the republicans did whatever they could to prevent Obama from succeeding at anything

Yup. Cut Educational programs right out. It's not like the US isn't top in all fields anyway... Wait wut?

and here i thought americans built the country

i'll be pleased to remind americans in the future that if they're not a corporation, they're not really doing anything to 'build' the nation

By the way, Obama is not in favor of for-profit online schools like pheonix, devry and itt tech...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_870085.html

We didnt build that.

i am, um, sorry to hear

LOL this thread is funny. Why should I pay for kids to go to school to smoke weed and fuck around? On another note, US education is shit anyways. 80% of graduates cant even use there degrees for anything worth making a living with. Im all for cutting pell grants.