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This is Day 2 of my mission to convince Bernie supporters of why an Andrew Yang presidency would be better for them and their families’ wellbeing. Yesterday, I spoke about financial security. Today, I will go at length about education [Thread]
Let’s start by acknowledging the extent of both candidates’ education plans. Bernie’s publicly known plans for education are to introduce universal pre-k, tax-payer funded tuition for public universities, cancelling all student debt, and throwing wads of cash at the k-12 system
Andrew also supports universal pre-K, but is ardently against free college. Instead, he opts to give everyone a Universal Basic Income, drastically lower the cost of college of those who want to go, cancel much of the student debt, and make structural change to the k-12 system
Both men’s plans are trying to help students pay for college and improve quality, but go about it in different ways. The way Andrew is going about it shows how much more recently he’s gone to college than Bernie, and how much more in touch he is with the average student.
I will explain why I find some of Bernie’s plans problematic and point out exactly how Yangs plans address these flaws more substantially right afterwards. So first off, here’s where I take exception with the concept of free college.
It treats people like one-size-fits-all cogs and simply shifting the burden of payment for tuition to tax payers doesn’t address the root, most important problems about college today: College is way too expensive, ineffective in facilitating employment, and is depressing our kids
Making public college tuition tax payer funded only makes the problem of expensive college worse. We saw this when the government decided to give every kid with a pulse tens of thousands of dollars in interest free loans when most should never have been in school originally
Free college is in the same vein: It writes a blank check to colleges almost unconditionally to anyone and everyone who gets into college, even people who realistically should not be in college, allowing colleges to price gouge the American people even worse than they do now.
Free college doesn’t address why college has gotten 2.5x more expensive in the last number of years. One reason is the ratio of non-faculty administrators to students has pretty much halved since the 90s. It used to be 1:50, now it’s less than half that.
It also practically forces kids to perpetually feed into this bullshit Ponzi scheme known as college. 44% of college graduates are underemployed, or working jobs that don’t require their degree. Another 3.8% are unemployed.
Bernie’s Free college plan coerces kids who don’t want to go to college...to go to college. 31% of kids who graduate high school today don’t ever attend college. Of the 69% who do go to college, about half of them never even finish college and drop out.
Recent studies have shown that the rate of moderate-severe depression in college students is at a staggering 41%!!! The rate of severe anxiety is at 34.4%!!! This is in part because we’re making kids go to school, even though they hate it.
No one ever talks about if kids actually WANT to go to school except for Yang. Bernie treats it as a foregone conclusion that every kid just up and quits his/her dreams and passions to pursue corporate employment through college. That’s bullshit.
With the Freedom Dividend and drastically lowered cost of college, kids who actually WANT to go to university can go, while the majority of kids who don’t wanna go can open a business, fund an art, etc. with their UBI. This is true freedom of choice
This highlights a key belief difference between Bernie and Yang in many different respects. Yang actually RESPECTS your time, mental health, and dignity/worth as a human being, even if you’re not doing an official job or in school
Bernie has no public plans on how to incentivize people to go into the trades. Right now, there are millions of job openings in the trades, while only 6% of high school students are enrolled in any technical/vocational program, whereas Germany is at 58%
Furthermore, more than 80% of college students are “barely attached to the workforce.” This means they work less than part time or not at all. Students are in college for 4-6 years.
4-6 fucking years of no income, saving or skill/resume building, all the while depressing yourself to mental illness, doing some shit you desperately don’t want to do while giving up your passion, while inflating the actual cost of college, for a 50/50 shot at a decent job.
That’s Bernie’s plan for students. Advocates for Bernie’s plan will point to the “so many other countries around the world have free public tuition!” Without ever really researching about how all their school systems differ from ours.
Japan has free college tuition, but they have a completely different K-12 system than us which weeds out the kids unfit for university learning through entrance exams and steers unfit kids towards the trades.
Bernie’s plan would perpetuate the myth that you HAVE to go to university to get any kind of a decent job/life. That thinking is destructive to our youth and our society. COLLEGE IS NOT FOR MOST PEOPLE!
Here’s how Yangs plan is different. First, to actually reduce the cost of college, he’d threaten to take away funding from schools that don’t keep their administrator to student ratios down to 1:32.
Once schools restructure that cost infrastructure, quality will be nearly the same and costs for students would go way down. Then, he wants to push people into the trades and technical schools.
This would increase competition between trade schools and universities and keep prices down, while filling a much needed hole in the economy that needed plumbers and the like. Those jobs also won’t be automated anytime soon.
Then he wants to start moving K-12 curriculum in a more practical direction, making schools teach financial literacy classes mandatorily. Teach kids about taxes and compound interest before they F up their finances.
Then he wants to start moving K-12 curriculum in a more practical direction, making schools teach financial literacy classes mandatorily. Teach kids about taxes and compound interest before they F up their finances.
Yangs plan is superior to Bernies because it gives you the FREEDOM to pursue education if you want to do so. $1000/month in your hands is infinitely better than $1,000 in the government’s hands
Seriously, where else are you gonna find this type of nuance from a political campaign? I’ve never seen a candidate inspire so many people to do extensive research into so many topics. This campaign breeds critical thinking, and I want everyone to experience that. Join us!
