Andrew Sullivan’s chart of the day:
That national education problem is also Washington State’s education problem, which is getting worse. If the folks we have in Olympia now—the ones with college degrees who rise to the noble call of public service—can’t find the smarts to fix a pretty straightforward revenue deficit, what the fuck will we do when rising tuition, closed programs, and more out-of-state recruitment results in fewer college graduates who actually live in Washington?
Part of the problem.
RIch keep getting richer.
College is just as much of a scam as health insurance these days.
You know what we need to do? Cut taxes. That will help.
Frito: Yah I know this place pretty good, I went to law school here.
Pvt. Joe Bowers: In Costco?
Frito: Yah I couldn’t believe it myself, luckily my dad was an alumnus and pulled some strings.
Dont go to college.
My sister doenst have a degree, makes about a grand less than others in her dept that all have degrees. She is the only one not swiming in student debt. The more you make, the more you’ll be first to get a pink slip when it comes to layoffs.
People should be talking about how some jobs, it doesnt matter if you have a degree or not, students are wasting time and money to get a degree and work along side people who dont have degrees.
While I acknowledge that this is, in fact, a real problem I would like to say that a chart with two different Y-scales is nothing more than a worthless, hype-generating piece of propaganda.
@6
Exactly. Why does a person need a degree to write computer code, for example? No degree is needed to weld airplane components, or wire or plumb a house or build boats or fix cars. All jobs that pay as much or more than most that require a degree. All needed functions in our economy. Really, you shouldn’t need a degree for most of the work-a-day jobs people do.
One of the biggest dis-services done high school students is this insistence on college that’s only really appropriate for less than half of them.
Amen @7
That chart is crap!
@7 and @9
The chart is crap, though you can have different y scales in an effective chart, the problem is that the y scales are of different ranges, without either starting at zero. I’ve tried re-creating this chart in a few ways, a same-scale, running to 0 at the bottom seems to be the best in this case.
@7, 9, 10
Sullivan vs. Edward Tufte cage match
@7, 9, 10
This is an easy chart to understand if you realize that 78,000/30,000=6,500/2,500=2.6
Both could easily have a single Y-axis that has 1.0 as their 1988 origin.
My 1969 tuition at Central Washington ($88) would have been $517 in 2010 dollars.
Also, if it’s important for our economy that banksters can get effectively zero percent loans from the feds, why isn’t it just as important that student loans are effectively zero percent interest? Then those graduates could actually contribute to the economy instead of making banksters richer.
@12 – If that’s all that needed to be shown, wouldn’t “Tuition Cost as a Percentage of Median Income vs Time” have been a better chart? That’s all this is doing, but in a shadier way.
@13, because student loans have traditionally been handled by private-market lenders. The government’s a pass-through.
@14 You could make that graphic, but it wouldn’t be the same. It would be a bit more brutal, though. It would be jumping from 8.5% of income to 19.7% of income.
Yeah, you read that right, tuition more than DOUBLED while income stayed exactly the same.
This chart, which you consider “shady” is pretty honest.
And, just because you couldn’t figure out the relations of the 2 Axes (which, incidentally, ARE labeled for average readers) doesn’t mean they’re trying to pull one over on you.