Lol, I have no desire to send my kids to private high school.
Actually, am I reading this right that you can use a 529 account to pay a student loan? Maybe that still makes the 529 accounts worth it.
Edit: Looks like itās capped at a lifetime limit of 10k though.
You donāt live in the south!
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So much this. Tuition is gonna skyrocket within a few years.
Public universities in America should not have tuition. Itās done like this in many European countries. This will have its own disadvantages (competition for admission would become fierce for public unis) but the advantages very much outweigh them.
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Do you want anybody roaming the halls at State U? Where are we gonna get coal miners and burger flippers if they can just go to college free?
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Even in Europe, students still have to test into the free college available to them. There are only so many vacancies in the programs available.
However, your point about the scarcity of vocational workers is a good one. Plumbers and electricians donāt do too poorly in Czech Republic but thereās a shortage of them because everybody wants to go to college.
What is human events dot com?
No idea, it was a Drudge Report link
Not a problem. The RADICAL SOCIALIST BIDEN is going to ban coal and burgers, it is known, because he hates America.
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This is also true in North America I think. You can make damned good money in the trades if you are organized in your business affairs and diligent in your work. I have handed an envelope with $12,000 in it to my contractor, lol.
As far as I can tell, California is doing this really well, and yes competition in the UC system is fierce. I think the average GPA for admission in the top 4 or 5 UCs is 4.0 or higher. But, there are several ālesserā UCs, and an entire Cal State System that accepts almost everyone, and then community college. My understanding is that financial aid is readily available to those who need it, so for many itās free.
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California is so weird. It does so many things right! You have a good, progressive tax code with no preference for capital gains, the state generally provides good health care, government just generally works for the residents (or at least it did when I was there). Butā¦the housing thing. Which seems completely unfixable.
Yeah, I think California has a huge cohort of relatively affluent and powerful people that do have some empathy for others and support institutional level social programs, but their willingness to make personal sacrifices ends really abruptly at their property line.
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you can transfer to basically any UC out of community college - they actually prefer taking these students because theyāre more established and have almost zero chance of dropping out. this is the route I took. I got a guaranteed acceptance if I met a certain GPA, which was not hard. I got into everywhere I applied including berkley. IIRC what was required was a 3.0.
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It is true, although you donāt need to work for yourself to make a decent living, and most people in the trades donāt. Being self-employed is difficult in any field, and thereās a whole lot of survivorship bias at play. Most guys who try to go it alone fail or give up. They either end up right back working for somebody else, or change fields entirely.
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CA absolutely fucks you if youāre poor. thereās almost nothing out there for you. I once made $13,000 in one year and was ineligible for cal fresh (food stamps) because I made too much money.
the housing problem is as bad as it is because there are zero safety nets here and weāve collectively decided we donāt care as long as we donāt have to physically see them, so they get shuffled around by cities according to how loudly residents are complaining.
even the state $15 min wage was far too little far too late and rolled out way too slowly.
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I think whether you are self employed or not, being in the trades is a relatively tough gig because youāve got to actually work to make money and if you arenāt good at it you either need to constantly be dealing with complaints or doing free ācorrectionsā to your prior work. As an office worker I can say with certainty that itās a lot easier to coast for days to weeks at a time in a cushy white collar job. I still get paid, and in a corporate setting the cost to fire someone is way higher. If youāre fixing someoneās plumbing itās a lot harder to do a shitty job and get away with it.
The worst is unemployment, which might be contributing to how bad the homelessness problem is.
No matter what you were making prior, the max unemployment payout is a laughable 425 a week. For a state with the largest cost of living in the country, unemployment benefits equal out to 10.62 an hour, a rate thats impossible to get housing on in almost every city in the state.
Its insanity. For how much good the state does, there are a ton of things that need fixing.
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