When a College Takes on American Poverty(theatlantic.com)
theatlantic.com
When a College Takes on American Poverty
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/college-poor-students/560972/?single_page=true
51 comments
In the same way that there was a War on Drugs [1] there was a War on Poverty [2], the New Frontier [3], and the Great Society [4] a decade earlier.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Frontier
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Frontier
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society
> Once you're poor, it's very hard to get out of poverty.
What % of people born in poverty are not poor by the time they are 30 ? Does anyone have that number ?
My intuition is that the number is higher.
What % of people born in poverty are not poor by the time they are 30 ? Does anyone have that number ?
My intuition is that the number is higher.
I don't know if this is a reputable source, however it claims in the USA 40% of men raised in the bottom fifth end up in the bottom fifth. That is about 4x as likely as a man in the top fifth.[0]
This is much lower than I expected.
[0] - https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/social-mobili...
This is much lower than I expected.
[0] - https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/social-mobili...
40% is only 2x as likely as random chance.
Still, I am not sure that the bottom 5th is what we want to be looking at. I would like the think that the insidious effects of poverty don't start until well below the 1/5 mark.
Still, I am not sure that the bottom 5th is what we want to be looking at. I would like the think that the insidious effects of poverty don't start until well below the 1/5 mark.
> 40% is only 2x as likely as random chance.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it.
Would 100% be only 5x as likely as random chance?
That’s an interesting way of looking at it.
Would 100% be only 5x as likely as random chance?
Half of Americans don't even have the savings to front a 400USD emergency bill. I'd say that's a pretty unrobust economic situation. Shit does happen, and not having the money to deal with it will cause more problems.
That oft quoted stat is a bad interpretation of a survey question that asked “How would you pay for an unexpected $400 expense?” with one choice being “from a savings account”. That’s not the same thing at all as having the money at all - for example, many in the upper 50% would just use their debit card, or put it on a credit card for a month for frequent flyer miles.
It seems to say that the to be in the bottom fifth in the US household income must be less than $22,095 (2001)[0]. That's very close to the federal poverty line. Not exactly but close.
The way news an documentaries talk about the poverty trap I was expecting 80%+.
[0] - http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf
The way news an documentaries talk about the poverty trap I was expecting 80%+.
[0] - http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf
Adjusting for inflation, that would be $31,615 in todays dollars, or about 150% the poverty level for a family of 3.
Not great, but I would still expect someone at that level to have substantially better odds than someone below the poverty line.
Not great, but I would still expect someone at that level to have substantially better odds than someone below the poverty line.
The poverty line for a family of 3 was $14,630. So you are basically right. Remember it includes all the people below that level.
You think that a majority of people make it out of poverty by 30? If someone thought that, they have a very closed off view of the world, even the U.S.
> Amarillo College, in Texas, is working hard to accommodate low-income students
such as by offering to pay vehicle-repair bills for families with only one car, reimbursing (through federal grants) baby-sitting bills, having 8 week mini-semesters, having administrators simulate homelessness so they can better help their students etc.
such as by offering to pay vehicle-repair bills for families with only one car, reimbursing (through federal grants) baby-sitting bills, having 8 week mini-semesters, having administrators simulate homelessness so they can better help their students etc.
> only one car
The "only one car problem" is pretty big. It is generally not kept in good repair (preventative costs go out the windows when you are poor) and the loss of transportation is often a job ending event. I used this to help put together a rural health grant (Dr & Mobile Unit comes to you). It was interesting. Obviously, the places where it hits hardest don't have public transportation.
I would be interested what federal grant they received that allowed them to reimburse baby-sitting. This is one of the most difficult areas to fund. Even with Head Start and Early Head Start, it is often a chore to get enough slots for college students.
One thing they don't seem to have a problem with that other schools do is attracting teachers. The accreditation committees have raised the requirements for college teachers and this cuts down the pool and also increases costs where they could go to other programs.
The "only one car problem" is pretty big. It is generally not kept in good repair (preventative costs go out the windows when you are poor) and the loss of transportation is often a job ending event. I used this to help put together a rural health grant (Dr & Mobile Unit comes to you). It was interesting. Obviously, the places where it hits hardest don't have public transportation.
I would be interested what federal grant they received that allowed them to reimburse baby-sitting. This is one of the most difficult areas to fund. Even with Head Start and Early Head Start, it is often a chore to get enough slots for college students.
One thing they don't seem to have a problem with that other schools do is attracting teachers. The accreditation committees have raised the requirements for college teachers and this cuts down the pool and also increases costs where they could go to other programs.
Modern-day college is a huge rip-off, especially book sales.
I'm waiting for a really progressive college to take MOOCs and make a degree program for the masses, one that carries enough prestige to be comparable. Hopefully, that day will come soon.
I'm waiting for a really progressive college to take MOOCs and make a degree program for the masses, one that carries enough prestige to be comparable. Hopefully, that day will come soon.
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The woman profiled has six children. The government cannot afford to meet all the financial needs of people who have large families and then decide they want a college degree.
I think you are missing the subtle point that helping the woman profiled get a college degree also helps her six children have better outcomes in life:
> And when parents get more education, their children tend to do better [0], not only in school but in all sorts of health outcomes.
[0]: https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/parental-education/
I can understand your desire not to provide material support for people who decide to have large families, but surely her six children made no such decision? To me, helping these kids’ mother complete a college degree seems like an exceptionally cheap intervention — especially since that money comes from a private foundation (the Amarillo College Foundation) and not the government itself.
But granted, I don’t know the magnitude of the positive effect on the kids.
> And when parents get more education, their children tend to do better [0], not only in school but in all sorts of health outcomes.
[0]: https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/parental-education/
I can understand your desire not to provide material support for people who decide to have large families, but surely her six children made no such decision? To me, helping these kids’ mother complete a college degree seems like an exceptionally cheap intervention — especially since that money comes from a private foundation (the Amarillo College Foundation) and not the government itself.
But granted, I don’t know the magnitude of the positive effect on the kids.
I am sorry but I disagree with you a little even though I mostly agree with you.
I sincerely believe people who have more than one child (perhaps with exceptions for natural twins and so on which I assume is rare) ought to be increasingly more responsible for their children. Once you have a hockey team over several years (not one of those rare cases of twins or triplets) I am honestly able to look at someone's eyes and say "you're on your own, buddy". However, that is besides the point.
The point is that we can reduce the cost of college. It is already absurd that state universities have to compete against the likes of Colgate and Colorado College. We can and must reduce regulatory burden on our state schools while requiring drastic cutdowns in spending on non-essentials. We don't need a big football team in any state school. We don't need an athletic complex. Strip away anything that isn't related to actual education or scientific research. No school has an airport. No school has a rocket launch pad. Why do we need multi-million dollar sports centers or dormitories? Why do we need a police force? Cut pay for all administration and force them to be at or below the pay for a tenured professor. In fact, get rid of most of the administration. A lot of the things they do is simply not the job of an educational institution. If the likes of Harvard and Yale want to do those things they are more than welcome. However, keeping costs low should be a primary concern for state schools and we should empower as well as require them to do so.
I sincerely believe people who have more than one child (perhaps with exceptions for natural twins and so on which I assume is rare) ought to be increasingly more responsible for their children. Once you have a hockey team over several years (not one of those rare cases of twins or triplets) I am honestly able to look at someone's eyes and say "you're on your own, buddy". However, that is besides the point.
The point is that we can reduce the cost of college. It is already absurd that state universities have to compete against the likes of Colgate and Colorado College. We can and must reduce regulatory burden on our state schools while requiring drastic cutdowns in spending on non-essentials. We don't need a big football team in any state school. We don't need an athletic complex. Strip away anything that isn't related to actual education or scientific research. No school has an airport. No school has a rocket launch pad. Why do we need multi-million dollar sports centers or dormitories? Why do we need a police force? Cut pay for all administration and force them to be at or below the pay for a tenured professor. In fact, get rid of most of the administration. A lot of the things they do is simply not the job of an educational institution. If the likes of Harvard and Yale want to do those things they are more than welcome. However, keeping costs low should be a primary concern for state schools and we should empower as well as require them to do so.
While I believe I understand your position, I think we also need to address the affordability and availability of contraception as well as the existence of sex education in public schools. While it is one thing when someone deliberately wants to have an above average number of children, if one doesn't have the knowledge and resources to conduct adequate family planning you can't exactly fault them and deny them help.
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My school literally has not one but two airports on its property, ones an old air force base that's used for transportation research the other services as the municipal airport.
In Australia you could be on around $500 pp (if you don’t live as a dependant) a fortnight paid all year (even on holiday) +2k p/y for books and the degree itself you start paying back only after you earn 40k.
She would get more from having dependants, it’s definitely super tough but doable if you can work during break with the ~$20 min wage as it wouldn’t affect payments.
Although it sucks seeing a University doing all this the silver lining really is that the worst bits of America really do bring out the best in these people that help.
She would get more from having dependants, it’s definitely super tough but doable if you can work during break with the ~$20 min wage as it wouldn’t affect payments.
Although it sucks seeing a University doing all this the silver lining really is that the worst bits of America really do bring out the best in these people that help.
I see your point and would be more sympathetic to it if we had proper sex education in k-12 and made birth control and abortions easier to obtain for poor people. Even so, clearly this lady made some poor choices.
Your point makes perfect sense for a teen with an unexpected pregnancy. This lady is 44 with 6 kids. 5 of the children are aged 2-11 years. In other words she just started pumping out babies like it was her job at age 33. She made some poor choices is the optimistic interpretation of this. It's also possible that some point she began to believe that having more kids resulted in proportionally more money from the state and charities. After all when it comes to children we have a habit of waving away this with 'oh, she made some mistakes.. but her kids shouldn't have to pay for that!'
Please don't post ideological trope rants to HN. They're repetitive and come from a galaxy far away from the intellectual curiosity this site exists for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can you elaborate here? Because fundamentally I think there is a highly complex issue here. Social systems are in place for those of need. Yet simultaneously these systems suffer the problem that they can create incentive systems for people to engage in undesirable behavior, and they are also open to exploitation by those who normally would not need their aid. One wants to empathize with the person from the article, yet doing so without considering the how and why of them being where they are is akin to trying to solve a variable of two equations while considering only one.
I also think calling the comment a 'trope' is unreasonable. This looks to be an incredible lucid example of possible, if not probable, abuse. Yet that's masked in the appeals to pathos. How is mentioning this anything like a trope? If there is viable reason to believe that empathy/sympathy is being abused, it certainly seems valid to consider it and point it out!
I also think calling the comment a 'trope' is unreasonable. This looks to be an incredible lucid example of possible, if not probable, abuse. Yet that's masked in the appeals to pathos. How is mentioning this anything like a trope? If there is viable reason to believe that empathy/sympathy is being abused, it certainly seems valid to consider it and point it out!
The problem is, that the kids are truly blameless. So you can try to punish her for her recklessness, but that punishes the kids too.
Or you could simply put the kids into foster care. Which has a very bad track record compared to being with mom.
So the data leads to prevention. (Education, or forced sterilization/abortion.)
Or you could simply put the kids into foster care. Which has a very bad track record compared to being with mom.
So the data leads to prevention. (Education, or forced sterilization/abortion.)
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The government has been increasingly effective at making it difficult to make logical choices on safe sex and pregnancy. The same, usually conservative, politicians that think these women shouldn't be having large families also don't want abortion clinics available nor do they want easily accessible birth control.
The US already suffers from a declining birthrate, to the point where we almost rely on immigration to maintain population growth. And in the wake of the Trump Administration, that seems to be declining.
Unless you embrace immigration or natalism (or both), your (age) demographic story is not going to look good in 20-30 years.
Unless you embrace immigration or natalism (or both), your (age) demographic story is not going to look good in 20-30 years.
Yes, and historically America has been unique amongst Western countries in that America has embraced immigration.
That embrace of immigration is perhaps the main reason the US has had a strong economy. Immigrants fuel the US university system, the strongest in the world, and the tech economy, which feed off each other. And accepting immigrants has led to a cosmopolitan feel in the US, which makes high-skilled immigrants want to come here. That is a big reason why New York is a finance capital.
The United States is now destroying its unique brainpower advantage by destroying immigration (basically in pursuit of political power by one party). It's a disaster for the US. But the smart immigrants will now go to other countries for university and start companies in other countries. It's a huge opportunity for other countries.
That embrace of immigration is perhaps the main reason the US has had a strong economy. Immigrants fuel the US university system, the strongest in the world, and the tech economy, which feed off each other. And accepting immigrants has led to a cosmopolitan feel in the US, which makes high-skilled immigrants want to come here. That is a big reason why New York is a finance capital.
The United States is now destroying its unique brainpower advantage by destroying immigration (basically in pursuit of political power by one party). It's a disaster for the US. But the smart immigrants will now go to other countries for university and start companies in other countries. It's a huge opportunity for other countries.
America might have been embracing immigration more, and for longer, but the Britain you have today too is to a large extent a consequence of embracing immigration post-WWII as we needed a workforce to rebuild our country. See "windrush generation" (more recently: "windrush scandal" over how poorly some of them have been treated) . If you're living in the UK you might have heard about it on the news recently (I say with typical British understatement).
Immigration was certainly good for our economy too.
Immigration was certainly good for our economy too.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the UK university system (and high tech economy, see DeepMind) is extremely strong. Having a lot of immigrants makes it attractivr for other high skilled immigrants to come and live.
growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell
That's fine, but now you need a way to cope with an outsized elderly population. Not just funding their benefits, but also providing them care, etc. Without population growth, this becomes an extremely expensive situation.
Because of global urbanization, that's a problem the whole world is going to have soon enough. Japan is leading the way and the US is slowly following. But, the trend is that in a hundred years the entire planet will be having sub-replacement birthrate. Yay. The population explosion crisis has accidentally been averted. Oops. Now we have the opposite crisis to deal with instead. Might as well start figuring it out early.
Why was this flagged?
Because it expressed a Politically Incorrect point of view.
In the long run, people with no children, on average, cost more than people who raise several taxpayers into adulthood. People are entitled to several times what they put in to the social security system. That money comes from somewhere. And, for the childless, that's other peoples' kids, mostly.
Please stop making up facts. No one is entitled to "several times" what they put in to social security. It comes out pretty close to even [1]. And that's if you completely ignore the time-value of money. If you treat social security as a wealth fund (like you're supposed to) rather than a "I'm paying for my parents" fund, the average person is getting less because their contributions should be earning a huge amount of interest over their working life. Remember, too, that if you're self-employed or make a lot of money you're going to get back significantly less than you put in because of the way the caps work. There's a good chance that a successful childless person is going to subsidize the social security payouts for people who sacrifice career have a bunch of kids.
The only place you get significantly more than you put in is Medicare, and that's because healthcare costs in America are out of control. More kids doesn't help that.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisconover/2012/12/03/aarp-lo...
The only place you get significantly more than you put in is Medicare, and that's because healthcare costs in America are out of control. More kids doesn't help that.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisconover/2012/12/03/aarp-lo...
> If you treat social security as a wealth fund (like you're supposed to) rather than a "I'm paying for my parents" fund, the average person is getting less because their contributions should be earning a huge amount of interest over their working life.
That's because it is an "I'm paying for my parents" fund. When the system started out it paid benefits to people who never paid into the system. The only reason there is any money in the "trust fund" at all is a result of population/GDP growth. If there was a population decline from too many couples having only one child it would bankrupt the system.
Moreover, the social security "trust fund" consists of government bonds, but bonds held by the government itself are just self-canceling worthless paper. Every dollar of credit is also a dollar of debt that the people who supposedly paid into the system actually spent on past government services. It's their children who inherit that debt whether you call it a "trust fund" or not. And if they have no children, the debt falls on someone else's children.
> Remember, too, that if you're self-employed or make a lot of money you're going to get back significantly less than you put in because of the way the caps work.
There are corresponding caps on social security tax for the same people. And self-employed people don't actually pay more, the "employer portion" is a subterfuge to make the social security tax rate seem to be half what it really is. Employers just deduct it from what they're willing to offer as compensation, which makes it seem like people are being paid less when they're really being taxed more.
That's because it is an "I'm paying for my parents" fund. When the system started out it paid benefits to people who never paid into the system. The only reason there is any money in the "trust fund" at all is a result of population/GDP growth. If there was a population decline from too many couples having only one child it would bankrupt the system.
Moreover, the social security "trust fund" consists of government bonds, but bonds held by the government itself are just self-canceling worthless paper. Every dollar of credit is also a dollar of debt that the people who supposedly paid into the system actually spent on past government services. It's their children who inherit that debt whether you call it a "trust fund" or not. And if they have no children, the debt falls on someone else's children.
> Remember, too, that if you're self-employed or make a lot of money you're going to get back significantly less than you put in because of the way the caps work.
There are corresponding caps on social security tax for the same people. And self-employed people don't actually pay more, the "employer portion" is a subterfuge to make the social security tax rate seem to be half what it really is. Employers just deduct it from what they're willing to offer as compensation, which makes it seem like people are being paid less when they're really being taxed more.
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What you are describing is a Ponzi Scheme
No, he’s describing redistribution (some people get a bigger payout proportional to what they paid in). You can have solvent pyramid shaped schemes, and SS isn’t even pyramid shaped except incidentally.
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Why was the original title changed by the poster? It reads "Colleges Are No Match for American Poverty".
The Atlantic and other sites regularly change A/B test article titles so they likely changed it
The website's tab title still says "When a College Takes on American Poverty". Perhaps the article was edited?
It's the HTML doc title. That's a legit choice. Those are often slightly more neutrally phrased.
This college seems like it's doing amazing things, but I will never understand why first world countries don't make poverty reduction a bigger priority :(