Why don't other colleges charge $240.00 tuition for full time students?

[Mo0o]

some schools are worth more than others

 

[PrinceofWands]

Originally posted by: BrownTown

Originally posted by: JS80
1) other people shouldn't be paying for your community college
2) there is no difference between $240 and $800 for a college education in the long run

Umm, yeah there is, lets go see what percent of harvard graduates are millionares and what percent of community college graduates are, i'm pretty certain there will be a HUGE difference. A good college provides soo many benefits over a bad one that its not even funny. First off you are taught be better teachers, you are foreced to adopt a more strict studing regiment, you get a big name or your diploma, and you get well contected contacts. Its true to a good extent that 5 years out of college people are gonna be looking more at your on the job experience than your college GPA, but you are sure as heck gonna get alot better starting job with a big name degree.

I coulda gone to a state school for free, but instead i went to the second most expensive university in the country, and I fully expect it to be worth every penny (which btw is alot less pennies than the full tuition due to financial aid, but the point is still valid).

You're full of crap.

It's mostly about personality and networking, and especially field. Business and law, yeah the college choice matters (but because of social perceptions and networking, NOT ability or difference of education). But no matter where my Masters in Education is from I'm gonna earn the same once I start teaching. If I had the personality that made me want to enter business or law then my personality is going to drive me to earn money, and therefore drive me to certain schools. A types with A types and all that. Ivy league schools are part of the old boys network - it's a state of mind, not a level of education.

I've looked over syllabi from the best schools and average schools...we're studying mostly the same material. Some have more rigorous schedules, but in the end we know the same stuff. I've looked over degree requirements - they're about the same (only the entry requirements vary). Expensive schools tend to require networking to get in, that's about their only difference.

Income has little to do with intelligence or education. In fact many studies have established inverse relationships between IQs above 2SD's over norm and earning potential over the lifetime. In other words you earn more if you're a little smarter, not a lot smarter. Furthermore a very large number of very wealthy people have no degrees, or only went back to earn them after making their mark in the business world. I can have a dozen doctorates, my earning potential as a teacher is still more or less capped. Conversely I can flunk out of high school and invent a little plastic pizza standoff and become an instant millionaire. Yes you generally earn more with a degree than without, but you have to look at it broadly - lawyers make more than teachers, and you usually need a jd to practice law, while only a Masters to be a teacher. Therefore you could make the false assumption that a higher degree pays more than a lower. However, you need at most a bachelors to be a cop and that pays far more than being a teacher. My point is that placing too much faith in the relation between intelligence and degrees and income is a very bad slope to be on.

Furthermore you can't compare Harvard to community college, you have to compare degree and field to degree and field. Compare an AA earner from Harvard going into social work with an AA earner from a community college going into social work. Do the same for Masters of Education. I think you'll find the earning potentials are about field choice, not college choice. Again, business, law, etc would be more likely to have an effect - but only because of the social perceptions and networking opportunities, and not any actual difference of education. I point this out because of the types of degrees given out...probably a very low percentage of harvard grads get associates, and I guarantee no community college grads get anything higher than associates. Therefore it's a skewed comparison.

 

[tk149]

I've attended science classes at a community college and classes at a top tier university. The community college courses were unbelievably easy compared to the university courses. Of course, YMMV.

 

[PrinceofWands]

Originally posted by: tk149
I've attended science classes at a community college and classes at a top tier university. The community college courses were unbelievably easy compared to the university courses. Of course, YMMV.

But have you attended the same class at each? Seriously, take English 101 at a community college, then go take it at Harvard. How much difference would there REALLY be? Again, I'm looking at syllabi for ODU, Reed, LCC, and WSU. For the equivalent classes there's very little difference (except at Reed where the amount of work is greater, though the topics covered remains the same).

 

[Mo0o]

Originally posted by: PrinceofWands

Originally posted by: tk149
I've attended science classes at a community college and classes at a top tier university. The community college courses were unbelievably easy compared to the university courses. Of course, YMMV.

But have you attended the same class at each? Seriously, take English 101 at a community college, then go take it at Harvard. How much difference would there REALLY be? Again, I'm looking at syllabi for ODU, Reed, LCC, and WSU. For the equivalent classes there's very little difference (except at Reed where the amount of work is greater, though the topics covered remains the same).

ive taken the same physics class at UW and at Duke and i can tell you the difficulty level is no comparison. I basically slept through UW physics. let's not forget science classes are all mostly curved and the level of competition is different at a massive state college and an elite top 10 school

 

[PrinceofWands]

Originally posted by: Mo0o

Originally posted by: PrinceofWands

Originally posted by: tk149
I've attended science classes at a community college and classes at a top tier university. The community college courses were unbelievably easy compared to the university courses. Of course, YMMV.

But have you attended the same class at each? Seriously, take English 101 at a community college, then go take it at Harvard. How much difference would there REALLY be? Again, I'm looking at syllabi for ODU, Reed, LCC, and WSU. For the equivalent classes there's very little difference (except at Reed where the amount of work is greater, though the topics covered remains the same).

ive taken the same physics class at UW and at Duke and i can tell you the difficulty level is no comparison. I basically slept through UW physics. let's not forget science classes are all mostly curved and the level of competition is different at a massive state college and an elite top 10 school

Then it's a pointless comparison because curving voids it. I'm looking at what information is available to be learned, not how you do compared to other people. I don't care what other people do, I'm there for me.

To me the 'difficulty' of the class is a combination of workload, topics to be mastered, time frame, and the grades I personally get on the assignments. Now, a bad teacher might make a class tougher to get anything from, but that doesn't make the school 'harder'. So if you learned the exact same material at Duke as UW, but had only 3/4 the time, it would be 'harder'. If you had the same time but learned twice the material it would be 'harder'. If you had the same material in the same time, but had to complete twice the number of assignments (or had to spend twice the time on the assignments) it would be 'harder'.

What other people do is wholly irrelevant because the point of a class is for YOU to learn the information. Period. There is nothing else. I guess it's hard for me to relate because in 90%+ of my classes I've always gotten the highest scores on anything I've turned in or done. I live with the basic assumption that if I actively participate I'm going to be in the top few no matter what. That makes me very non-competitive with others - everything I do is about doing the best I can do, or the most I can learn.

 

[Mo0o]

Originally posted by: PrinceofWands

Originally posted by: Mo0o

Originally posted by: PrinceofWands

Originally posted by: tk149
I've attended science classes at a community college and classes at a top tier university. The community college courses were unbelievably easy compared to the university courses. Of course, YMMV.

But have you attended the same class at each? Seriously, take English 101 at a community college, then go take it at Harvard. How much difference would there REALLY be? Again, I'm looking at syllabi for ODU, Reed, LCC, and WSU. For the equivalent classes there's very little difference (except at Reed where the amount of work is greater, though the topics covered remains the same).

ive taken the same physics class at UW and at Duke and i can tell you the difficulty level is no comparison. I basically slept through UW physics. let's not forget science classes are all mostly curved and the level of competition is different at a massive state college and an elite top 10 school

Then it's a pointless comparison because curving voids it. I'm looking at what information is available to be learned, not how you do compared to other people. I don't care what other people do, I'm there for me.

To me the 'difficulty' of the class is a combination of workload, topics to be mastered, time frame, and the grades I personally get on the assignments. Now, a bad teacher might make a class tougher to get anything from, but that doesn't make the school 'harder'. So if you learned the exact same material at Duke as UW, but had only 3/4 the time, it would be 'harder'. If you had the same time but learned twice the material it would be 'harder'. If you had the same material in the same time, but had to complete twice the number of assignments (or had to spend twice the time on the assignments) it would be 'harder'.

What other people do is wholly irrelevant because the point of a class is for YOU to learn the information. Period. There is nothing else.

Well grades do matter if you plan on going into graduate school and that is dependent on what other peopel do.

In addition, while you cover the same "topics," how indepth you go, how rigorously those topics are tested, how much homework is assigned all varies between schools. no matter how you slice it, Duke physics is tougher than UW physics. atleast the courses i took.

 

[PrinceofWands]

Originally posted by: Mo0o

Originally posted by: PrinceofWands

Originally posted by: Mo0o

Originally posted by: PrinceofWands

Originally posted by: tk149
I've attended science classes at a community college and classes at a top tier university. The community college courses were unbelievably easy compared to the university courses. Of course, YMMV.

But have you attended the same class at each? Seriously, take English 101 at a community college, then go take it at Harvard. How much difference would there REALLY be? Again, I'm looking at syllabi for ODU, Reed, LCC, and WSU. For the equivalent classes there's very little difference (except at Reed where the amount of work is greater, though the topics covered remains the same).

ive taken the same physics class at UW and at Duke and i can tell you the difficulty level is no comparison. I basically slept through UW physics. let's not forget science classes are all mostly curved and the level of competition is different at a massive state college and an elite top 10 school

Then it's a pointless comparison because curving voids it. I'm looking at what information is available to be learned, not how you do compared to other people. I don't care what other people do, I'm there for me.

To me the 'difficulty' of the class is a combination of workload, topics to be mastered, time frame, and the grades I personally get on the assignments. Now, a bad teacher might make a class tougher to get anything from, but that doesn't make the school 'harder'. So if you learned the exact same material at Duke as UW, but had only 3/4 the time, it would be 'harder'. If you had the same time but learned twice the material it would be 'harder'. If you had the same material in the same time, but had to complete twice the number of assignments (or had to spend twice the time on the assignments) it would be 'harder'.

What other people do is wholly irrelevant because the point of a class is for YOU to learn the information. Period. There is nothing else.

Well grades do matter if you plan on going into graduate school and that is dependent on what other peopel do.

In addition, while you cover the same "topics," how indepth you go, how rigorously those topics are tested, how much homework is assigned all varies between schools. no matter how you slice it, Duke physics is tougher than UW physics. atleast the courses i took.

I've had very few curved classes, and so far I've always been high enough that it's kept my GPA at acceptable levels for me. Nothing I've ever applied to has really come down to grades. Rather it's because it's non-competitive, or my test scores make up for it, or my extras pad it up, or whatever - I have no idea. Of course I've only applied to less than a half-dozen grad schools, so my experience is limited. I just have a feeling that again it's based a lot upon field, not school.

I'm not doubting your experiences, just qualifying in order to get people to look at the ideas objectively. I've just heard a lot of false comparisons in here, and a lot of missing bits of information.

I agree on the workload points, definitely. Reed is pretty freaking insane compared to other schools I've looked at, for the amount of reading and assignments. However they still only cover the same topics for the most part. If I understand Plato, his place in history, his application to political theory, education, etc - then taking a course that focuses on him as a topic shouldn't vary that much from school to school. May be more work required at different schools, but the amount to be learned remains largely constant. In my own experiences at least. The workload would make the class somewhat 'harder', but should still be qualified so it doesn't evoke the idea that one is inherently teaching more than the other.

 

[uberman]

Several people seem to be saying that colleges are cheaper because of a state income tax in California, I disagree.

I have never seen a more tax hungry state than Washington state.

Uncooked whole foods were taxed until 1979. How can a person not buy food?

Labor is taxed. If you want to hire someone to build onto your house; you must pay sales tax on every hour of labor you pay this worker. This is regressive, and one must think it over before hiring someone for a job.

Alcohol prices are double that of the state of California. The state government has a monopoly on alcohol sales.

You can't even go for a walk in Washington without a license. If you go to trailheads outside of Seattle you may not park and go for a walk without the purchase of an Access Stewardship Pass. I believe they are $35.00 per year.

The governor Gary Locke was trying to solve something a few years ago and he decided that he found $1,000,000.00 to solve the problem. Wasn't this cash collected and earmarked for a specific purpose?

I think the coffers of Washington state are overflowing and I don't pin California's low college cost on a plethora of funds due to a state tax.

 

[Parasitic]

I just remember that linear algebra at CSU was hella a lot easier than the lower division linear algebra at Berkeley.
CSU linear algebra >> A- overall in a semester. Hardly did any work.
Cal linear alegbra >> first midterm I got a 34, then got a B- in the class.