I tach at a community college and this topic comes up periodically. The definition used for being homeless is not what people generally think of when they hear this term.
What is surprising to me is that I'm expected to teach a homeless person in such a way that they pass the class and know the material. When a homeless person fails my stats suffer. It is not reasonable that a person whose life is in chaos be able to pass their classes and understand what has been taught.
I wish I could find this again, but I saw a similar thought somewhere out there about teaching elementary school kids with terrible home lives in rough areas. The sentiment was something along the lines of, "How am I supposed to teach them fractions when they're getting raped at home."
Some people are homeless in order to get away from the people beating or raping them at home. For such individuals, couch surfing or whatever can be a step up over what they have been dealing with.
Can you explain which definition they use. I can't find any difference between the term as it is used in the article and the ordinary sense of the term.
If you are living with a friend but aren't part of the lease and can, theoretically, be kicked out at any time you are homeless. The key factor being uncertainty in living situation.
For most people, "home", "residence", "address", and "domicile" all mean the same thing.
But when you stray into multiple residency or homelessness, those definitions drift apart. Different definitions of homelessness may focus on different words that are not strictly synonymous, which makes those definitions also drift apart.
In a strict technical sense, you can't be without a domicile, but it may be difficult to do things like vote or pay taxes or get licenses for your domicile when you are outside it and without at least a semi-permanent mailing address.
But you can be without a permanent residence, even if you have been sleeping in the same spot for a while. That occurs whenever you don't have the legal right to be there. If your name (or your custodial parent's name or legal guardian's name) is not on the lease, that address is not your permanent residence, even if it is a long-term roof over your head.
But then some people define homeless as having no literal building in which to shelter. Living in a tent or vehicle on property that you own may meet this definition, yet still qualify as having a residence. Some definitions go so far as to measure one's intent for sleeping that night. If you have no idea whatsoever where you will lay your weary head tonight when exhaustion takes you, you are so thoroughly homeless that you might as well be referred to as "homeleast". That's why these surveys have to ask so many questions--to identify those with shelter situations of most and least concern.
> What is surprising to me is that I'm expected to teach a homeless person in such a way that they pass the class and know the material.
I recently left teaching CC to pursue a PhD, one thing I will say is don't let CC become "No Child Left Behind". Let your stats suffer and fight administration when they ask why. I've had co-workers that just handed students a Cengage textbook and surfed the internet all day, and these were SENIOR MEMBERS of the department. As much as I hate the stereotype, this is government work - you need to do A LOT to get fired. Hell, actually trying to teach might label you a "hard worker".
As I mentioned in another comment, my solution was to rethink how I taught. I had a 2 hour lecture and a 3 hour lab each week. So, class 1 was pure lecture and class 2 was just giving them time to work on homework (I wouldn't classify what I did as flipped, but sort of). Assume outside class time they CANNOT (no will not) do the work. In that mindset, how do you provide them time to learn? Just like in a martial art, the sensei doesn't lecture the entire time and you are expected to drill at home, there is actual class time devoted to drilling.
If you don't have enough time, fight for more time. If you're the Stat instructor, look for your state's course library [1] (link to NC's). Dig through the courses, find which ones offer more credits. Then go through the 1-2 year legalities to have it pass. This was how I ensured my Java students had passed at the very least algebra before taking my class.
Other tricks of the trade are recording lectures and posting them online. Give them every opportunity to succeed. Then, its their own inabilities that cause them to fail - the blame can't be on you, you gave them every chance.
Rising costs of living are pricing people out of the system.
You can't have children, a home, a vehicle, access to education, health care, recreation, and artistic pursuits. Pick two or three, and maybe in the future you might be able to acquire others.
Oh and don't pick children, since you'll have to provide those to your child as well, some of them immediately.
Public transport will always remain cheaper. Maybe the last mile will become shorter though, but even here I doubt there is money for segway shuttles to the trainstation, let alone cars. But in a city without cars (apart from service and transportation of bigger goods) maybe there could be money for it.
Worse, I suspect. 3 million commercial truckers in the US, where at least some portion of them owning some amount of schooling from a community college[1]. They fit right into this bucket.
Not to mention that many are owner-operators, meaning they own the truck itself.
This may slow the adoption of self-driving trucking for smaller companies (many larger companies do own the truck), but it will hurt the drivers that much more when it happens.
I always figured if I had (access to) a self driving car I'd live further out of the city because I could be on a laptop or even sleep for part of the commute. Thus have more affordable housing.
And while those are technically possible on public transportation (bus) . I don't want to sleep on a bus. Especially if I am by myself with a laptop bag. And the times it takes to wait for bus and walk to/from makes it unappealing. But a private pod is completely different for my scenario
This is semi-localized. You can have all of that on 40k
Depending on where you are, this is likely with a really long commute. I think there's some study somewhere that found long commutes to be one of the biggest sources of stress in the US.
Delaying kids is wise for pretty much everyone, though.
Delaying childbirth increases the incidence of birth defects. Also, it may be that sleep deprivation later in life is worse for the parents, with regards to dementia. People in their 20's have much better physical and energy resources for dealing with children. In the old days, younger people lived in closer proximity to older people who could relay their experience, so we had the best of both worlds for child-rearing.
I suspect that much of the malaise of modern life is actually based on isolation and the breakdown of community interrupting the transmission of incidental knowledge. Now we have developed an online substitute which has some dramatic disadvantages. Our culture is becoming coarser and bereft of its finer points and subtler knowledge. Much of the population of this website will knee-jerk against this observation, even while extolling the power and value of such knowledge giving certain companies like Apple and various startups their special competitive advantage.
In any case, a society which artificially forces the delay of childbirth for its poorer citizens might seem dystopian to many. Some would argue that letting market forces determine this is far better than government edicts. What we have now is a society that subjects most everyone to market forces with regards to reproductive decisions, except for the very poorest and most disconnected with cultures of productivity. Weird when you think about it that way.
Well I'm 20 minutes from Downtown and 2 from light rail. Don't own a house, though it'd be cheaper to do so versus renting.
You've got a good point about childbirth. I was thinking a bit too much of people who have 3 kids by 25, which seems to put lots of stress on them and their kids.
I find CPI to be genuinely curious basket. Where are they finding housing, college, and health care that's only going up 2% a year? Certainly not the west coast where 10-20% annual increases are routine.
Here's an interesting article speculating on reasons why policy-makers have an inherent incentive to deny that inflation is taking place (with special note on how it relates to housing costs):
If you're living in a hot metro area, your CoL will rise much faster then 2% a year. Your wages will not.
However, there are a lot more people living in Nowhereville, Middle America, where rents are not going through the roof. There aren't any jobs there, but that's not reflected in the CoL index.
We're basically re-living 1880-1900. Consolidation and automation is driving the power of rentier class people.
CPI is funny about certain things... it weighs rents highly which skews things as there's an effective price floor through the "prevailing rents" that drive housing subsidy.
I live in the Vancouver area where house prices have shot through the roof. However, rent price for me has not gone up over the last 3+ years at all. Not even 2% (or whatever is the amount my landlord is legally allowed to raise).
Measuring inflation is apparently quite hard and there are always some conspiracy theories. I think the intention is to try and somewhat filter out real estate bubbles from CPI which does make some sense if you assume a certain mix of home owners, long time renters, new renters. New renters may see a large % gain but they are only a small portion of a normal market.
The problem is not really how we measure CPI. The problem is ZIRP that is skewing everything. Hopefully we can start moving away from that.
I'm skeptical. What definition of homeless are they using?
I doubt it's mostly people actually roughing it on the streets, the colloquially understood definition of "homeless". If it's not, it's mighty dishonest of them to use a picture of tents for the article (fake news?).
According to the source study these are the things they count as "homeless", 14% have at least one of the items below...
Any of the below items:
– Thrown out of home: 6%
– Evicted from home: 3%
– Stayed in a shelter: 2%
– Stayed in an abandoned building, auto, or other place not meant as housing: 4%
– Did not know where you were going to sleep, even for one night: 8%
– Didn’t have a home: 2%
I think any of those are VERY BAD as far as impact on academics is concerned. Whether these actually constitute "homeless" is perhaps not the most important issue.
Seems like a pretty broad definition. So if your parents throw you out and you go live with your friend or grandparents, you're homeless? I have the same general question for all of those points.
Well, if the issue is the exact definition of "homeless" you're perhaps right.
But the real problem here is that a significant number of CC students don't have a stable home life and this WILL cause serious obstacles for the completion of any academic program.
Very few people are actually "live-on-the-street" homeless, but housing insecurity starts having negative impact long before they're literally on the street.
This doesn't surprise me at all. We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage, and if you absolutely have to have a college degree to get a job, you're willing to make sacrifices to do it. So what is someone to do?
The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive.
I run a computer science academy that's free until you get a job (https://lambdaschool.com), and I can't believe how many people we talk to that just $1,000 of tuition would be a deal-breaker for. I was talking to one of our best students last week and learned that she was living on the floor of a relative and trying to use a touchscreen and some half-working cloud editor to code because she couldn't afford any type of computer, even the cheapest $50 version. It was really slowing her down, but she had no other option, and didn't know what to do. (Don't worry, we shipped her a computer.) I hadn't even thought to ask.
The crazy thing is the value of taking someone from unskilled to skilled is enormous; we see $50,000/yr swings in annual salary all the time, and they get that for the rest of their lives. So say they work for 40 years, that's a $2m increase in lifetime salary pre-tax. The cost of us training them to get there is <$10k. But we frequently ask people to either go into an amount of debt or to try to cashflow on minimum wage. It just doesn't work.
It is a broken system but community colleges are made for people like this. It doesn't take 40k in student loans, it takes 2.5k in funds over 2 years which you can piece together at a minimum wage job or if you really need to take out as a loan. Then you've got an associate degree and half of a bachelor.
How expensive is community in Cali?
It does seem the system isn't made to inform people of their options.
cali community college is around 500-600/semester in tuition. you can get the tuition waived completely if youre from an economically disadvantaged background.
I was thinking for a bachelor's degree, and in that instance at the community colleges + cheap state school you're looking around $10-20k for tuition plus ~four years of living costs (assuming full-time). You could do it for less, but there's no question it's a lot if you're making minimum wage.
Full Pell Grant was $5,500 when I received it. And with that being said, it's not necessarily a good thing if people end up using it to go to college to get a degree in an art that they can't use for a good job. (Although I still largely disagree with universities being a vehicle for job training).
I don't know if this is unique to Florida, but most of the community colleges here became state colleges, thus enabling them to provide certain bachelor's degrees.
Let's be real... outside of trade professions like programming/carpentry/plumbing/etc. an associates degree is barely a step up from a GED (and sometimes worse: "Why didn't you just take the extra two years and get your bachelors???"). It also doesn't really matter how cheap it is, the main cost for the community college demographic is the opportunity cost. Most don't have support structures to give them the basics while they are at school, so they have to support themselves PLUS earn an extra 2.5k in disposable income, and then keep up with their studies on top of all of that. And since an associates gives you extremely limited social mobility in comparison to a bachelors most just forgo it, often replacing school with an extra job.
In terms of social mobility a college degree is the new high school degree, anything less is exactly that and will not give you sufficient social mobility especially when you're on the lower end of the spectrum to begin with. We need to accept this and begin treating college like we did high school, making it free and standardized for everyone. The only other option I can see is trying to radically change social norms that have developed over the past 30-40 years and I just don't think that's feasible outside of select industries like ours.
That would just make a masters the new collage degree.
The real problem is a huge swath of the US economy is based on reputation not ability. Exclusivity is the goal, so the more people reach benchmark X, the further companies will move the benchmark.
That's an impossible problem though, isn't it? Reputation was used as a proxy for ability until it became an end itself, but until we can correctly attribute some metric of ability (which sounds slightly dystopian) before hiring people we will continue to rely upon proxies to inform our decisions.
Of course, you really don't have this problem in economies where middle class jobs aren't scarce...
I'd rather take it a step backwards. Instead of making college free and standardized, fix high schools so that a diploma means something and your entire populace does have a foundation.
High school already doesn't mean anything, making college free and standardized means that college becomes not just a defacto expectation but something everyone has to do and there's really no point in that when we have the level below that underperforming.
I'd agree, but don't think that's quite possible. At least with college you can have selection even if it's free, but high school is mostly mandatory, so the curriculums will always revert to whatever shuttles the most kids through the fastest.
I think the real genius of making college free is not making it mandatory (of course, easier said than done). It's there if you need it and want to take the next step in your education, but for those who would rather not be there or would do something else that should be a viable option as well, and then you don't have to marginalize the education across the board.
High school is both mandatory and selective. Most schools have multiple tracks: vocational, general, college prep, honors / ap. Also private and some public high schools, like specialized magnet schools, can be more selective in admissions than many universities.
In small towns the tracks may end up being a couple of different english and math classes, band vs autoshop (if either is funded) and how much chemistry/physics you complete.
That selectivity thing has more to do with how we fund and operate schools and less with the requirements of education.
If you look at NYC, they have a model of neighborhood elementary schools and location based high schools, but also a network of merit based advanced and magnet schools.
When I was in high school in a rural upstate NY town, we had tracked programs with "smart" and "not so much" kids and rarely interacted directly with kids more than one track up or down in school. (There was only 90 kids in the graduating class)
It was a real eye opener when taking some mandatory class as a senior (something like civics) when I discovered that my writing partner didn't really know how to read or write. To me that's the tragedy of schools -- that should not happen.
Just let people stop going to high school at age 16 and make the last 2 years more rigorous.
There need to be other changes to go with that, but the people electing to stop school would be happier and I think wouldn't miss out on much learning.
It may be different for each state, but the cost of even Community College has increased quite a bit in the last decade. I'm attending one of the cheaper colleges in my state and tuition costs alone are about $4,000 for a full credit year. This does not include things like books or transportation. I'm now going part-time and still have another year and a half to go, but the total cost for me so far has been about $7,200. The doesn't even take into account the return in education you're getting which I believe to be sub par compared to University courses I've taken.
While I'll gladly take the cheaper degree compared to those offered in universities, it isn't as cheap as most people anticipate. Many of my co-workers talk about it in a similar fashion and are quite surprised when I show them what I'm being charged.
In California Community Colleges, tuition is about $46/unit or $500/semester for a typical workload. Plus the community colleges have fee waiver for low income individuals. Books can be expensive but from my experience, I could get a semester bus passes for students quite cheap. Cal grants may cover the rest if you are low income from my own experience they are quite generous.
There's an income share agreement and you submit forms to the IRS that lets us see your taxes. So it's a legal agreement.
You pay a fixed percentage of salary if you're above a certain threshold (currently $50,000/yr). If you don't get a job in your field above that threshold you never pay us anything.
I believe that at least in the US, lots of hospitals will underwrite your nursing degree in full or in part, as long as you agree to work there for some period of time. Different than this, but along the same lines.
A fixed percentage for a fixed number of years (right now 2 years), unless you meet a dollar cap (right now $30k). Any recruiting fees we get are deducted from what you owe, so they pay for your tuition. And if you make less than $50k/yr you don't pay anything.
As a member of this demographic I'm seeing a huge reluctance for peers (and a reluctance in myself) to bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and take a minimum wage job until I can get better on my feet. I feel like I'm so close to the promised utopia upper class lifestyle of a full-time software engineer that taking extreme measures like the women described in this article seem justified.
But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? How many hours and how much frustration was endured trying to code on a touchscreen device?
Interesting you say that. I happen to live 5 blocks from the new central library in San Diego. It's huge and very expensive (nearly $200M). It also has what appears to be 100 or so public computers that are pretty much used non-stop by the large homeless population which borders the area to the east of downtown. Look at some of the more negative yelp reviews for it: https://www.yelp.com/biz/san-diego-public-library-san-diego-...
Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.
I don't think think legally there are libraries not like that anywhere. To be removed, someone has to be committing a crime. In most cases with homeless people that aren't actually committing an obvious crime it's loitering (or solicitation if panhandling). In a library if you're actually reading a book or using a computer you're not loitering any more than anyone else there.
But we require our students to talk a lot. At least in the libraries I've been to there's an expectation of noise level. That said, I haven't been to very many libraries.
This is a problem with the design of the system. "Using the computer" just so you can be inside in the air conditioning is definitely not how those resources were intended to be used. The problem is that it's impossible to practically police this behavior individually, but easy to detect in aggregate. If the homeless person just sits around in the library doing nothing, they're loitering, but because they're sitting at a computer eating up a resource, it's not loitering. I certainly don't mean to assume a homeless person wouldn't have a legit reason to use the library computers. That's why I noted the difference between policing an individual is impossible, but seeing the trend in aggregate is easy.
Some of those yelp reviews are amazing - I can only assume they are coming from the same group of people that thinks that the homeless should stop being losers and just get a real job.
I used to get kicked out of the San Diego library for smelling bad when I was homeless in San Diego. It was a loose interpretation of some rule about interfering with other people's use of the library. I also know of a library system that literally has a smell rule. It pisses me off because it is basically a Jim Crow law. I have serious allergies and respiratory problems and it can literally make me ill when someone shows up stinking to high heaven of strong perfume. But you can bet the librarians would not have thrown them out had I complained.
That "you smell" thing is basically code for "no homeless people." There is no objective smell-o-meter that indicates when someone is actually a threat to public welfare or something. And in settings where people did not know I was homeless, I did not see evidence that I actually smelled bad. They would ask me about my vacation plans while cutting my hair.
Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.
There's lots that can be done. How about more computers, for a start? If they're monopolizing 100 computers then how about 1000? Install public showers and laundry facilities, too. Add in a volunteer job training center. Run free programming classes and job interview tutorials. Resumé review classes would be great, too.
Some libraries are not even open 8 hours a day, every day. In fact, most library systems seem to not be open 7 days a week. Even the ones that are typically have shorter hours at least on some days.
> I'm seeing a huge reluctance for peers (and a reluctance in myself) to bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and take a minimum wage job until I can get better on my feet.
How far in the black will a minimum wage job put you month/month? How long will it take to put yourself up on your feet with it?
>As a member of this demographic I'm seeing a huge reluctance for peers (and a reluctance in myself) to bite the bullet, swallow my pride, and take a minimum wage job until I can get better on my feet
Don't do it. Life is all about priorities and keeping your focus. Once you start mixing work and studies, both will suffer.
Go hungry, sell plasma, visit a food bank, do what you have to do. But keep your eye on the prize.
I got my master's in software engineering half time while working full time as a software engineer. During those four years I was also volunteering once a week, had a few side projects going on, wrote a book that made >$50,000 over the last two years, did freelance work, and maintained a relationship (got married two days after I graduated!).
There were certainly periods of time where I didn't see friends much, and my husband had to (gasp) cook dinner once in a while, but it was doable, and I graduated with a 3.7 GPA. I'm not a genius, I certainly did my fair share of procrastination, it was mostly just about making almost every day a "work day" (at least for a few hours), keeping things interesting by alternating between different types of work, and finding creative times/ways to study (commuting, lunch break, doing class busywork watching TV in the evening, etc)
I don't think I would have gotten "more" out of the program by quitting my job and just doing that full time. If anything, the financial stress would have made things more difficult.
>The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive.
This is an extremely privileged statement. Those homeless community college students would jump at the opportunity to take out $20,000 in student loans to get through their studies. The problem is they have no credit and come from a background where getting someone to cosign for your loans is a nonstarter. That leaves a paltry $5k/yr in Pell grant money for living expenses, and hoping your subsidized Stafford loan (if you're even eligible) covers all of tuition/fees/books.
Your post is informative, thanks for taking the time to write it. Minor nit: It would have been better if you dropped the aggressive opening sentence, and let your well-written depiction of the facts stand alone, especially as it seems the other poster was operating in good faith. FSM knows the public square is filled with enough unconstructive and divisive language these days.
And at a proper rate. Having a credit cosigner to get you that 4% loan can mean the difference between spending a lifetime paying interest, and paying down your principal in 10 years.
It's not just obtaining the loans but the terms. I know someone who's immediate family doesn't have great credit and/or great jobs. They became a software engineer but had something like an 8.5% interest rate. He worked out of San Diego and hopped on a job in Atlanta because the salary and cost of living was better for paying off the high interest loan.
I'll add in why I dropped out of college (current software engineer making six figures).
My dad made just enough money to get us past the point where Pell grants were denied because of my Dad's income. Unfortunately, my family still couldn't afford it and I was exceptionally weary of taking out 150k in student loans. The most they could afford to offer me was $200/month in rent. After a semester, I just dropped out and got a job at a local ISP as a software engineer.
Would I have went to school? Absolutely, but I couldn't afford it. As a person with Aspergers, it would have also been exceptionally hard for me to work /and/ attend school full-time. I tried that and it didn't work out.
I still have dreams of getting a doctorate. I love school and I love learning. I love being in class and attending lectures. Maybe when I can afford it and do just that, I'll do it.
As a person who graduated three years ago, the education system (even to an upper-lower/lower-middle class kid) is absolutely disheartening and dream crushing. Intellectuals don't speak of social darwinism, but their organizations, fiscally and structurally, still do. I will always feel inadequate for never having achieved a degree that all my friends will soon or now have.
I learned to only rely on myself, though. It's turned me into a very mature and responsible 21 year old. It still feels like I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm working on it.
> This doesn't surprise me at all. We're now in a place where a non-skilled career doesn't get you much more than minimum wage, and if you absolutely have to have a college degree to get a job
This is so totally and utterly not true. What you need these days is the same as you needed in old days: training. Going to college doesn't guarantee you anything unless your future employer considers it "training" -- which is not many fields.
There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area, and their salaries are starting to rival average tech workers -- especially if they decide to work overtime (which many of them are because the demand is so high).
I highly support and recommend Mike Rowe's organization which is doing a lot to actually help normal people find good paying jobs, and not selling them some absurd dream about education[0].
It seems more and more the case that employers are not willing to train employees. This is not surprising given the trend away from long-term obligations. Although, I wonder if this is reinforced in some way (employment/tax policy, law, etc.).
Agreed. I know HVAC people rolling in cash. Plumbers cleaning up. General contractors trying to keep up with demand. Ditto electricians.
The consistent trait among all of these guys is that they did good work at a fair price, were pleasant and reliable to work with, consistently communicate and were honest. This results in these guys getting lots and lots and lots of word of mouth referrals, not to mention call backs for future work.
When people are putting up a reasonable chunk of their own after tax money for work like that, 99% of the time it's enough for them that their biggest concern is trust and word of mouth recommendations is where trusted referrals come from. Integrity goes a long way in the contractor world.
I heard a coworker basically boast about making $300,000 a year coding in python. Thing is afaik, he didn't have a college degree. He knows how to code in python and was able to put in extra hours for a client who was in a hurry to get something done while working as a contractor.
This IT career track is pretty amazing to me.
You can get on a fast track to make a lot of money, with no college degree or having to go through an expensive (in time/money) training program. But if you didn't put in enough hours (much like having a second part or full time job) to learn new skills, you will be knocked off the fast track before you know it.
Anyone poor enough to be homeless or food insecure should qualify for a Pell grant, which should largely pay for community college. We just need to figure out how to solve the other problems.
I was talking about this at work today, that we expect things with huge societal gains to be entirely handled by individuals despite the fact that a) it obviously doesn't work and b) we never used to do it like this. College education in the US and the UK used to be heavily subsidised. Now it isn't and we wring our hands at all of the downsides saying "but what can we do?"
Yeah, the solution is pretty clearly to shift the risk/expense to some other party. There seems to be zero political will to have the government do any of that (or anything, really), so it is really up to the private sector.
Problem is, it's not clear it's possible to shift the benefits to the private sector as well. The government just gets to ride free on the societal benefits. This is why all the decent railways in the world seem to be publically owned.
(Yes, there are badly run publically owned railways. What I'm saying is that it seems to be impossible to successfully run a railway privately.)
> It found that 13-14% of students were homeless ...
Incorrect.
The study actually found that, "63 percent of parenting community college students surveyed were food insecure and almost 14 percent were homeless..."
That 14% is therefore a percentage of a percentage of a subset of those surveyed.
Meaning it only makes up 8.82% of "parenting" students, alone, and we are never given what percentage that the "parenting" subset comprises of the whole.
So the headline should really read, "Less than 8% of community college students surveyed are homeless."
Where homeless can mean thrown out or evicted from a previous residence, stayed in a shelter or abandon building, car, etc., or actually had no home or idea where to stay.
While the study is worthwhile, the USA TODAY article is worthless.
The article and headline are correct. You can see for yourself in Table 3 of the linked study.
For your interpretation to be right the wording would have to be, "63% of students are food-insecure and, of those students, 14% are homeless". As written, there is no indication that those two percentages are related.
> For your interpretation to be right the wording would have to be, "63% of students are food-insecure and, of those students, 14% are homeless".
Actually, no. For my interpretation to be absolutely correct it would need to be:
"63 percent of parenting community college students surveyed were food insecure and of those students almost 14 percent were homeless..."
So I see your point and I stand corrected, but I contest that the sentence in question was written very poorly--easily leading to this misinterpretation.
The subject of it is "parenting community college students", yet the context shifts regarding the 14% according to the table you mentioned.
There the 14% is representative of "Prevalence of Housing Insecurity, Homelessness, and Food Security Among Survey Respondents."
Therefore, the 14% is of the whole but that sentence alludes, incorrectly, to only the "parenting" subset.
Homeless for at least a night, over the past year. If you've been thrown out of your apartment, and have to crash on a friends' couch, you qualify.
Most homeless people don't end up on the streets, and don't stay homeless for very long. It's still an incredibly wretched experience, and not a sustainable one. Once you've burnt through all your friends that will lend you their couch, you will be sleeping on the street.
That bum asking you for change in SoMo? They too were sleeping on a friends' couch, before they ended up panhandling.
I share something in common with the subjects of this article. Came from a good, though not wealthy, home. Parents wanted me to get an education like they didn't get, so I went to community college majoring in information systems and programming.
Worked a part-time (20-30 hours) job, had an apt, but was evicted because people I lived with partied all the time and didn't obey the rules. I didn't have enough to get a place on my own, so I slept in my car or at the homes of friends for almost a year, keeping the tech support call center job and going to school.
Though I didn't get a degree, it was a good lesson of personal responsibility, lifelong learning, and not relying on others. Ended up in software development by starting at the bottom at a tech company (customer service) and learning on my own time at night, clawing my way up. If my parents would have taken me back in (if they even would have), I'm not sure I'd be where I'm at today. I do wish I would have been able to graduate though.
This experience is sort of what leads me to view with derision tech interviews that only focus on CS/algorithms, and ignore the more common day-to-day challenges of software engineering, most of which I learned on the job.
"How can you feed yourself on $8 an hour with a kid and pay rent?"
Welfare. When I worked for $8 an hour, my coworkers who were single parents had Medicaid, subsidized child care, and could get basically whatever they wanted in terms of groceries (plus they were still spending money on booze, weed, and cigarettes), whereas I had no health insurance and less than $100 a month after fixed expenses, not including food. I was eligible for a tiny amount of food stamps and Medicaid after the expansion, but I opted to get a second job instead.
Raising a child takes a lot of time and energy. All of your energy, really. Working full time and raising a child on your own isn't easy, even if you get medicare, medicaid, subsidized housing and food stamps. It's incredibly hard for single parents to escape poverty.
Being young, single, and broke sucks, but the situation isn't nearly as hopeless.
Why on earth should I be subsidizing that company, though?
I agree that making sure that person, and people like them, should have the support needed to make sure that both them and their child are fed and housed and generally taken care of. Why that means I should be implicitly subsidizing the business, instead of them being obligated to pay a living wage, is beyond me.
You're not subsidizing that company. The company is subsidizing welfare. A person making at least some money requires less money in form of social transfers.
In the end, is it better to subsidize that person's wages or have them become completely unemployable? This is not a leading question. Perhaps it would be better to just pay them to be a parent but it's not obvious to me.
Its not easy, because the company is not a charity. They are not giving away money at a loss to poor people to reduce welfare burden. They are hiring them for the purposes of making a profit. If they had to provide a full living wage to those on food stamps, they would either A. still be making a profit and eat the losses or B. stop making a profit and promptly fire them. There is no altruism here.
No, I disagree. The company is getting away with paying less because of welfare. And I reject the false choice you presented. The company should be paying a living wage, plain and simple. If they can't, then they go out of business. One which is better run will take it's place.
And the government is getting away with providing less welfare because the company is paying. The company probably can pay more, the large ones always can, but then they would hire someone else. At a higher price point, a better employee will take their place.
No. The government is still having to provide welfare because the company is shirking it's responsibilities.
I'm sorry, but I will not accept the argument that it is ok for a company to have their employees on welfare. They are a for-profit entity. I should not be subsidizing them because they choose not to pay their employees enough.
You're taking a very narrow view of the issue. There's no arbitrary obligation for a company to pay a "liveable wage", whatever that is.
The whole minimum wage debate in the US is a shitshow. Both sides of the debate are equally idiotic. What matters is minimising the amount of welfare the government has to pay to keep people out of poverty. If the minimum wage is too low, then like you say, the government has to subsidise some companies that can afford to pay more but aren't, because there's a surplus of labor. If the minimum wage is too high, then people that would otherwise be employed become unemployed, and stop generating any wealth, which results in the government having to pay more welfare overall.
This is a complex problem that needs to be solved using large amounts of data. Arguments like yours barely scratch the surface.
So you are saying that an external force should make companies pay different wages to different employees depending on what a particular person needs for their standard of living?
The cut off for welfare is determined by the size of your family. So to achieve what you describe, a company that has two people of the same minimal capabilities should pay the one that has kids more than the one that doesn't.
Also it is possible to live without welfare (even if you qualify) if your expenses are low, but require welfare if your expenses are high. So it would also follow that two employees of equal value to a company would be paid differently with the larger amount going to the one who is living in more expensive housing.
Depending on the study, wouldn't it make sense that there are people, already homeless, who begin attending as students in order to gain new technical skills that will hopefully assist them in finding a new career/job?
Rather than students attending community college and becoming homeless either from those costs, or from having gone to a "four year" university that forced them into debt.
Not many CC students finish in two years, in another comment I made, Texas found only 1 in 7 complete within 2 years. Given that span of time and the other factors happening in their lives, they could be homeless beforehand, or become 'homeless" (plenty of discussion here on what that qualifies as) during the course of their time as a student.
Firstly, now I feel like crap for using "living in a van down by the river" as my opening joke for teaching Microsoft Office (When I taught Word our first lecture was writing a letter of resignation, and then each lesson built on doing 'freelance work' like using Excel to calculate the necessary number of bootleg DVDs I needed to sell to not have to live in a van).
The number does not surprise me, considering there is a 1 in 7 chance a community college student will finish [1]. This stat was one of the reasons I altered my class to allow 3 hours of open lab time to work on homework with me available. I had a number of non-traditional students (former military, GEDs, single mothers). When they were not in school, they were working (or dealing with kids). We can joke about how computer science students are night owls working on their assignments for long hours, but that seems like an arbitrary ceiling when you have someone that doesn't fit the "young adult that has free time" mold. Hell, its the motivator for my PhD research, making CS work easier to understand/complete.
Now, I will also say, this study is glossing over "Pell chasers", who only sign up for community college to get the Pell grant and then never show up again. My initial thick skin came from building a rapport with students only to see them vanish as soon as that check came. It doesn't help they can do this for 9 semesters before getting in "trouble" (no legal trouble, just no more free money). At my school, you had to show up to class once (first day when no one lectures) to get your money.
I will say that teaching CC was very interesting and rewarding. I've met deadbeats, Pell chasers, former prisoners, former crack heads, and geniuses that dropped out of HS. Just showing them you actually cared about their learning could be the world to them - some are scamming the system, but some truly don't want to drive a forklift for the rest of their lives.
This article is so right! I went to Borough of Manhattan Community College, but I'm lucky to be 28 now and be able to live at my parents, I'd be homeless otherwise. : )
(P.S. i then got a Bachelor of Engineering from a 4 year college, interned at Stanford University, was a GSoC fellow, got a lead iOS developer job at a startup in NYC making ALMOST 6 figures, got kicked out of the country for not getting selected at the H1B, worked at a startup in Paris, quit the startup in Paris because it was boring, and spent the last 6 months burning through my saving while living in Paris to build a startup without business model. I am now nearly homeless, but working freelance while nearly ready to launch my startup. Almost homeless, though!)
Did you know lipstick causes breast cancer, given that nearly 80% of people who get breast cancer wear lipstick?
Sorta funny you go through upwards of 12 years of schooling and come out the other end with zero skills to speak of... but wait, just put in another 5-6 years and maybe you'll have something to show for it ;)
Where I live in California public high school students are graduating with up to 3 years of programming course work and with Solidworks certifications. Not to mention reading, writing, math, fundamental science, history, and economics. I understand many students underachieve and some schools let students down, but it's important to pay attention to the successes and make efforts to replicate them.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about employer cutbacks to employee training programs? It seems to me they're shifting those costs to tax payers...
find the root cause by looking at rising college tuition, and by transfer rates. The root cause is not the community college. The community college is the destination.
I see this perspective from people who are on non-bathing routines frequently (some people don't bathe with soap for perceived health reasons, etc).
Odor developed from more than two days of failing to bathe with soap is apparent to all but the most extremely smell-impaired (there are some people who can smell very little or nothing). Wearing deodorant themselves makes people drastically more sensitive to others' body odor.
The only plausible explanation for the stylist's vacation-plans conversation is that he or she was doing their best to treat you respectfully, tolerating the odor.
As far as "should society impose body odor norms on everyone?", I am unsure. It is likely if we all stopped using deodorant, we would tolerate body odor much more. However, you are stuck in this reality, where people in confined spaces are expected to wash with soap and apply deodorant on a regular basis. I assure you that almost everyone can detect body odor. It's not voluntary; it is a large amount of input to their nose.
Wearing deodorant themselves makes people drastically more sensitive to others' body odor.
And I can smell the deodorant, the detergent on their clothes and other scents that people with more conventional lives are either unaware of or do not object to. I find these smells objectionable. Meanwhile, rabbits and birds are unbothered by hanging near me. Animals operate on a basis of smell and they apparently find these chemical smells of "normal" people objectionable and I don't smell like that.
I am sleeping in a tent for health reasons. All those chemicals make me ill. I hope to return to a more conventional housing situation soon, but I will continue to avoid a lot of chemicals that other people routinely use and don't view as problematic.
Everyone smells. You might find my smell offensive. I would likely find yours offensive as well. Your assertion that you are sure that I smell having never stood next to me just makes your classist assumptions really clear to me, though I am sure you will deny it.
When these kinds of rules are made, they basically boil down to "You need to come across as middle class or upper class and this is a code for being allowed to toss anyone we feel doesn't fit, if we so desire." It was an aggressively enforced rule in one library where the head librarian was basically a lying psycho bitch. We once got told "We are getting complaints" not 30 seconds after we sat down. Another library in the same system did not enforce this rule and they were nothing but nice to us. The enforcement of the rule was basically a Jim Crow type practice applied to the poor.
The only plausible explanation for the stylist's vacation-plans conversation is that he or she was doing their best to treat you respectfully, tolerating the odor.
Or, alternately, that I didn't particularly smell.
Again, I'm not advocating for one scheme or another. I'm telling you what the current reality is in the United States. Other countries have different norms for this. Other things done in the U.S., such as wearing shorts, are considered deeply offensive in other countries. When in those countries, I don't wear shorts.
Using non-human animals as a benchmark is not going to help you in any way. The scope of this discussion is humans in the United States.
You are permitted to disagree, but this doesn't change reality. The arbitrary nature of your treatment is due to the tolerance of the "nice" library. The "psycho bitch" (way to promote tolerance, dude!) head librarian was also thinking of her own welfare and ability to concentrate on her duties.
Please also recognize that most of the poor in the United States do have access to soap and water. I dispute that anyone making the median household income is middle-class or upper class.
I feel for you and your circumstances. You do appear to care about how other people's behavior affects you. You appear to have less regard about how your choices and behavior affects other people. Then again, this is completely understandable and justifiable considering how comfortable their lives are in comparison to yours. It doesn't make it correct.
I actually knew the woman. She actually was a psycho bitch. Her own staff hated her, not just some of the library patrons.
You are in no way taking anything I am saying at all seriously. You seem blind to your own biases and they are incredibly offensive. The person cutting my hair merely being polite and tolerating my smell is NOT "the only plausible explanation."
I have had people tell me to my face they thought I was a tourist. I am not misreading politeness as something else.
So, I think I am done talking with you. Your remarks utterly fail to meet any kind of baseline civility and respect for me as a human being. I'm homeless, so you think you know all there is to know about me based on that one detail and don't confuse you with the facts, your mind is made up.
I think this is an interesting conversation because you make tons of assumptions about me. You reject advice from my perspective because you claim it doesn't contain baseline civility. I haven't attacked your lifestyle or made any judgement about it. I am telling you that from my comfortable perspective, this is how reality is in the United States.
I think the only thing "uncivil" about my perspective is that you disagree with it. And that's fine. I think people in unfortunate circumstances have lots of leeway to feel anger and express it.
Who knows, maybe you are outside of my office building right now, and I'll be another faceless programmer drone to put a dollar in your cup.
and I'll be another faceless programmer drone to put a dollar in your cup.
I don't panhandle. This is yet another case of you making incredibly offensive assumptions about me and feeling zero obligation whatsoever to own it or even vaguely attempt to pretend to be respectful.
I do freelance writing, I blog and I do resume editing. That fact is easily determined.
They have not been anything but respectful to your opinions. You've also in this conversation let us other readers know that you're poor and homeless, living in a tent. Can you really blame anyone for making a point- and that's all it is- about panhandling? The crude insult about a librarian you felt you were mistreated by is telling about your view on the value of others. I really can't palate the blatant hypocrisy in your words; you are easily offended by others and at the same time accuse everyone else of being horrible.
At the moment, I check into a hotel about once a month and shower. I have not used homeless services where I currently am, so I don't know what showers they offer here. Where I am currently, there is an abundance of excellent public park bathrooms and I have no problem doing some basic clean up there, as needed, though it isn't a shower. I am not at the coast, so there is no ocean here.
When I was in downtown San Diego, I showered almost every single day at either Neil Good or Rachel's. After I left downtown but was still in San Diego County, I typically went to the beach a few times a week to clean up.
So, when I was being told to leave the library in downtown San Diego (for supposedly smelling), I was showering daily. It was bullshit.
By the time I realized that I should have put "smelling bad" in quotes, it was too late to edit it.
I have a serious health condition. I sometimes do smell, but not specifically because I haven't showered. I actually smelled a lot worse back when I had a corporate job and an apartment because I was a lot sicker. But I had a more conventional lifestyle, so I never got accused of smelling. This is part of why I am so confident that accusations that "you smell" are merely code for "no homeless people." There are plenty of people who smell bad, but that isn't a reason to exclude them from a public space. That accusation does get used to exclude homeless people.
I am not saying that homeless people never smell. I am saying that a) everyone has some kind of smell, to some degree b) smells being "offensive" are largely subjective, not objective and c) objecting to "smell" is often not really about the smell but about the fact that the person is homeless.
If we routinely threw people out of public spaces for having a strong odor, regardless of other details, then I wouldn't think this was basically a Jim Crow practice. But when "smell" gets used as the reason to exclude a poor person but is never used to exclude other people who may also be equally disgusting, then it really isn't about the smell per se. That's just basically a cover story.
Showering without soap is not "non-bathing". E.g. https://www.thestar.com/life/2017/03/13/soap-free-for-seven-... -- just the first link I found. I tried it for a couple months myself and got the same kind of reaction from friends: both eww at the idea and, by their report, no noticeable smell. (Note that if you switch to soap-free showering it's said you can expect to stink a bit for a few days as your skin adjusts. I didn't ask during those first days.)
I have encountered smelly people in libraries, but I see no reason to gainsay Mz about this.
Hmm. Wonder if some of them use it as somewhere to take a shower, etc. If they have a way to document their low income for grants, it could be a free, albeit high effort home base of sorts.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadWhat is surprising to me is that I'm expected to teach a homeless person in such a way that they pass the class and know the material. When a homeless person fails my stats suffer. It is not reasonable that a person whose life is in chaos be able to pass their classes and understand what has been taught.
But when you stray into multiple residency or homelessness, those definitions drift apart. Different definitions of homelessness may focus on different words that are not strictly synonymous, which makes those definitions also drift apart.
In a strict technical sense, you can't be without a domicile, but it may be difficult to do things like vote or pay taxes or get licenses for your domicile when you are outside it and without at least a semi-permanent mailing address.
But you can be without a permanent residence, even if you have been sleeping in the same spot for a while. That occurs whenever you don't have the legal right to be there. If your name (or your custodial parent's name or legal guardian's name) is not on the lease, that address is not your permanent residence, even if it is a long-term roof over your head.
But then some people define homeless as having no literal building in which to shelter. Living in a tent or vehicle on property that you own may meet this definition, yet still qualify as having a residence. Some definitions go so far as to measure one's intent for sleeping that night. If you have no idea whatsoever where you will lay your weary head tonight when exhaustion takes you, you are so thoroughly homeless that you might as well be referred to as "homeleast". That's why these surveys have to ask so many questions--to identify those with shelter situations of most and least concern.
I recently left teaching CC to pursue a PhD, one thing I will say is don't let CC become "No Child Left Behind". Let your stats suffer and fight administration when they ask why. I've had co-workers that just handed students a Cengage textbook and surfed the internet all day, and these were SENIOR MEMBERS of the department. As much as I hate the stereotype, this is government work - you need to do A LOT to get fired. Hell, actually trying to teach might label you a "hard worker".
As I mentioned in another comment, my solution was to rethink how I taught. I had a 2 hour lecture and a 3 hour lab each week. So, class 1 was pure lecture and class 2 was just giving them time to work on homework (I wouldn't classify what I did as flipped, but sort of). Assume outside class time they CANNOT (no will not) do the work. In that mindset, how do you provide them time to learn? Just like in a martial art, the sensei doesn't lecture the entire time and you are expected to drill at home, there is actual class time devoted to drilling.
If you don't have enough time, fight for more time. If you're the Stat instructor, look for your state's course library [1] (link to NC's). Dig through the courses, find which ones offer more credits. Then go through the 1-2 year legalities to have it pass. This was how I ensured my Java students had passed at the very least algebra before taking my class.
Other tricks of the trade are recording lectures and posting them online. Give them every opportunity to succeed. Then, its their own inabilities that cause them to fail - the blame can't be on you, you gave them every chance.
[1] http://www.nccommunitycolleges.edu/
You can't have children, a home, a vehicle, access to education, health care, recreation, and artistic pursuits. Pick two or three, and maybe in the future you might be able to acquire others.
Oh and don't pick children, since you'll have to provide those to your child as well, some of them immediately.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/h...
This may slow the adoption of self-driving trucking for smaller companies (many larger companies do own the truck), but it will hurt the drivers that much more when it happens.
And while those are technically possible on public transportation (bus) . I don't want to sleep on a bus. Especially if I am by myself with a laptop bag. And the times it takes to wait for bus and walk to/from makes it unappealing. But a private pod is completely different for my scenario
Depending on where you are, this is likely with a really long commute. I think there's some study somewhere that found long commutes to be one of the biggest sources of stress in the US.
Delaying kids is wise for pretty much everyone, though.
Delaying childbirth increases the incidence of birth defects. Also, it may be that sleep deprivation later in life is worse for the parents, with regards to dementia. People in their 20's have much better physical and energy resources for dealing with children. In the old days, younger people lived in closer proximity to older people who could relay their experience, so we had the best of both worlds for child-rearing.
I suspect that much of the malaise of modern life is actually based on isolation and the breakdown of community interrupting the transmission of incidental knowledge. Now we have developed an online substitute which has some dramatic disadvantages. Our culture is becoming coarser and bereft of its finer points and subtler knowledge. Much of the population of this website will knee-jerk against this observation, even while extolling the power and value of such knowledge giving certain companies like Apple and various startups their special competitive advantage.
In any case, a society which artificially forces the delay of childbirth for its poorer citizens might seem dystopian to many. Some would argue that letting market forces determine this is far better than government edicts. What we have now is a society that subjects most everyone to market forces with regards to reproductive decisions, except for the very poorest and most disconnected with cultures of productivity. Weird when you think about it that way.
You've got a good point about childbirth. I was thinking a bit too much of people who have 3 kids by 25, which seems to put lots of stress on them and their kids.
Officially, inflation is only 2% a year
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SA0L1E?output_view=p...
I find CPI to be genuinely curious basket. Where are they finding housing, college, and health care that's only going up 2% a year? Certainly not the west coast where 10-20% annual increases are routine.
http://www.georgistjournal.org/2012/09/21/denying-inflation-...
However, there are a lot more people living in Nowhereville, Middle America, where rents are not going through the roof. There aren't any jobs there, but that's not reflected in the CoL index.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....
CPI is funny about certain things... it weighs rents highly which skews things as there's an effective price floor through the "prevailing rents" that drive housing subsidy.
Measuring inflation is apparently quite hard and there are always some conspiracy theories. I think the intention is to try and somewhat filter out real estate bubbles from CPI which does make some sense if you assume a certain mix of home owners, long time renters, new renters. New renters may see a large % gain but they are only a small portion of a normal market.
The problem is not really how we measure CPI. The problem is ZIRP that is skewing everything. Hopefully we can start moving away from that.
I doubt it's mostly people actually roughing it on the streets, the colloquially understood definition of "homeless". If it's not, it's mighty dishonest of them to use a picture of tents for the article (fake news?).
But the real problem here is that a significant number of CC students don't have a stable home life and this WILL cause serious obstacles for the completion of any academic program.
Very few people are actually "live-on-the-street" homeless, but housing insecurity starts having negative impact long before they're literally on the street.
The actual report is this.. .http://wihopelab.com/publications/Hungry-and-Homeless-in-Col...
Its a pretty bad handicap for students when things like that happen during their studies.
The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive.
I run a computer science academy that's free until you get a job (https://lambdaschool.com), and I can't believe how many people we talk to that just $1,000 of tuition would be a deal-breaker for. I was talking to one of our best students last week and learned that she was living on the floor of a relative and trying to use a touchscreen and some half-working cloud editor to code because she couldn't afford any type of computer, even the cheapest $50 version. It was really slowing her down, but she had no other option, and didn't know what to do. (Don't worry, we shipped her a computer.) I hadn't even thought to ask.
The crazy thing is the value of taking someone from unskilled to skilled is enormous; we see $50,000/yr swings in annual salary all the time, and they get that for the rest of their lives. So say they work for 40 years, that's a $2m increase in lifetime salary pre-tax. The cost of us training them to get there is <$10k. But we frequently ask people to either go into an amount of debt or to try to cashflow on minimum wage. It just doesn't work.
How expensive is community in Cali?
It does seem the system isn't made to inform people of their options.
I had friends who were working class but not poor and they got that for school.
Why can't this model be extended into a 4 year school for twice the price?
Let's be real... outside of trade professions like programming/carpentry/plumbing/etc. an associates degree is barely a step up from a GED (and sometimes worse: "Why didn't you just take the extra two years and get your bachelors???"). It also doesn't really matter how cheap it is, the main cost for the community college demographic is the opportunity cost. Most don't have support structures to give them the basics while they are at school, so they have to support themselves PLUS earn an extra 2.5k in disposable income, and then keep up with their studies on top of all of that. And since an associates gives you extremely limited social mobility in comparison to a bachelors most just forgo it, often replacing school with an extra job.
In terms of social mobility a college degree is the new high school degree, anything less is exactly that and will not give you sufficient social mobility especially when you're on the lower end of the spectrum to begin with. We need to accept this and begin treating college like we did high school, making it free and standardized for everyone. The only other option I can see is trying to radically change social norms that have developed over the past 30-40 years and I just don't think that's feasible outside of select industries like ours.
The real problem is a huge swath of the US economy is based on reputation not ability. Exclusivity is the goal, so the more people reach benchmark X, the further companies will move the benchmark.
Of course, you really don't have this problem in economies where middle class jobs aren't scarce...
A factory cares about it's absolute production vs cost. However, a lawsuit is based in part on relative skill.
High school already doesn't mean anything, making college free and standardized means that college becomes not just a defacto expectation but something everyone has to do and there's really no point in that when we have the level below that underperforming.
Both are monumental tasks, though.
I think the real genius of making college free is not making it mandatory (of course, easier said than done). It's there if you need it and want to take the next step in your education, but for those who would rather not be there or would do something else that should be a viable option as well, and then you don't have to marginalize the education across the board.
If you look at NYC, they have a model of neighborhood elementary schools and location based high schools, but also a network of merit based advanced and magnet schools.
When I was in high school in a rural upstate NY town, we had tracked programs with "smart" and "not so much" kids and rarely interacted directly with kids more than one track up or down in school. (There was only 90 kids in the graduating class)
It was a real eye opener when taking some mandatory class as a senior (something like civics) when I discovered that my writing partner didn't really know how to read or write. To me that's the tragedy of schools -- that should not happen.
There need to be other changes to go with that, but the people electing to stop school would be happier and I think wouldn't miss out on much learning.
While I'll gladly take the cheaper degree compared to those offered in universities, it isn't as cheap as most people anticipate. Many of my co-workers talk about it in a similar fashion and are quite surprised when I show them what I'm being charged.
You pay a fixed percentage of salary if you're above a certain threshold (currently $50,000/yr). If you don't get a job in your field above that threshold you never pay us anything.
Fixed percentage forever? Fixed percentage of only the first job? Fixed percentage until a certain amount has been paid?
But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? How many hours and how much frustration was endured trying to code on a touchscreen device?
She isn't close to one. And I don't know of many libraries that are cool with you videoconferencing with instructors and pair programming 8 hrs/day.
Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.
That "you smell" thing is basically code for "no homeless people." There is no objective smell-o-meter that indicates when someone is actually a threat to public welfare or something. And in settings where people did not know I was homeless, I did not see evidence that I actually smelled bad. They would ask me about my vacation plans while cutting my hair.
There's lots that can be done. How about more computers, for a start? If they're monopolizing 100 computers then how about 1000? Install public showers and laundry facilities, too. Add in a volunteer job training center. Run free programming classes and job interview tutorials. Resumé review classes would be great, too.
How far in the black will a minimum wage job put you month/month? How long will it take to put yourself up on your feet with it?
Don't do it. Life is all about priorities and keeping your focus. Once you start mixing work and studies, both will suffer.
Go hungry, sell plasma, visit a food bank, do what you have to do. But keep your eye on the prize.
There were certainly periods of time where I didn't see friends much, and my husband had to (gasp) cook dinner once in a while, but it was doable, and I graduated with a 3.7 GPA. I'm not a genius, I certainly did my fair share of procrastination, it was mostly just about making almost every day a "work day" (at least for a few hours), keeping things interesting by alternating between different types of work, and finding creative times/ways to study (commuting, lunch break, doing class busywork watching TV in the evening, etc)
I don't think I would have gotten "more" out of the program by quitting my job and just doing that full time. If anything, the financial stress would have made things more difficult.
http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com
This is an extremely privileged statement. Those homeless community college students would jump at the opportunity to take out $20,000 in student loans to get through their studies. The problem is they have no credit and come from a background where getting someone to cosign for your loans is a nonstarter. That leaves a paltry $5k/yr in Pell grant money for living expenses, and hoping your subsidized Stafford loan (if you're even eligible) covers all of tuition/fees/books.
Agreed. It was an emotional response to a subject of personal issue.
My dad made just enough money to get us past the point where Pell grants were denied because of my Dad's income. Unfortunately, my family still couldn't afford it and I was exceptionally weary of taking out 150k in student loans. The most they could afford to offer me was $200/month in rent. After a semester, I just dropped out and got a job at a local ISP as a software engineer.
Would I have went to school? Absolutely, but I couldn't afford it. As a person with Aspergers, it would have also been exceptionally hard for me to work /and/ attend school full-time. I tried that and it didn't work out.
I still have dreams of getting a doctorate. I love school and I love learning. I love being in class and attending lectures. Maybe when I can afford it and do just that, I'll do it.
As a person who graduated three years ago, the education system (even to an upper-lower/lower-middle class kid) is absolutely disheartening and dream crushing. Intellectuals don't speak of social darwinism, but their organizations, fiscally and structurally, still do. I will always feel inadequate for never having achieved a degree that all my friends will soon or now have.
I learned to only rely on myself, though. It's turned me into a very mature and responsible 21 year old. It still feels like I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm working on it.
This is so totally and utterly not true. What you need these days is the same as you needed in old days: training. Going to college doesn't guarantee you anything unless your future employer considers it "training" -- which is not many fields.
There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area, and their salaries are starting to rival average tech workers -- especially if they decide to work overtime (which many of them are because the demand is so high).
I highly support and recommend Mike Rowe's organization which is doing a lot to actually help normal people find good paying jobs, and not selling them some absurd dream about education[0].
[0] http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/
> There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training.
We don't disagree
Keywords being experienced and bay area which is super expensive to live in. Non experienced wanna be workers in bay area have hard time to pay rent.
The consistent trait among all of these guys is that they did good work at a fair price, were pleasant and reliable to work with, consistently communicate and were honest. This results in these guys getting lots and lots and lots of word of mouth referrals, not to mention call backs for future work.
When people are putting up a reasonable chunk of their own after tax money for work like that, 99% of the time it's enough for them that their biggest concern is trust and word of mouth recommendations is where trusted referrals come from. Integrity goes a long way in the contractor world.
I heard a coworker basically boast about making $300,000 a year coding in python. Thing is afaik, he didn't have a college degree. He knows how to code in python and was able to put in extra hours for a client who was in a hurry to get something done while working as a contractor.
This IT career track is pretty amazing to me.
You can get on a fast track to make a lot of money, with no college degree or having to go through an expensive (in time/money) training program. But if you didn't put in enough hours (much like having a second part or full time job) to learn new skills, you will be knocked off the fast track before you know it.
(Yes, there are badly run publically owned railways. What I'm saying is that it seems to be impossible to successfully run a railway privately.)
Incorrect.
The study actually found that, "63 percent of parenting community college students surveyed were food insecure and almost 14 percent were homeless..."
That 14% is therefore a percentage of a percentage of a subset of those surveyed.
Meaning it only makes up 8.82% of "parenting" students, alone, and we are never given what percentage that the "parenting" subset comprises of the whole.
So the headline should really read, "Less than 8% of community college students surveyed are homeless."
Where homeless can mean thrown out or evicted from a previous residence, stayed in a shelter or abandon building, car, etc., or actually had no home or idea where to stay.
While the study is worthwhile, the USA TODAY article is worthless.
For your interpretation to be right the wording would have to be, "63% of students are food-insecure and, of those students, 14% are homeless". As written, there is no indication that those two percentages are related.
Actually, no. For my interpretation to be absolutely correct it would need to be:
"63 percent of parenting community college students surveyed were food insecure and of those students almost 14 percent were homeless..."
So I see your point and I stand corrected, but I contest that the sentence in question was written very poorly--easily leading to this misinterpretation.
The subject of it is "parenting community college students", yet the context shifts regarding the 14% according to the table you mentioned.
There the 14% is representative of "Prevalence of Housing Insecurity, Homelessness, and Food Security Among Survey Respondents."
Therefore, the 14% is of the whole but that sentence alludes, incorrectly, to only the "parenting" subset.
> Of children who have parents that are in community college, 14% are homeless?
There is no breakdown of such characters on a parenting vs. non-parenting basis.
So it could be 13% of "homeless" students are parenting vs. 1% who are non-parenting, the complete reversal, or anything in between.
As in_cahoots noted above, check out Table 3 of the data. It alone is much more clear on what's what.
So there are 1.4 million homeless students?
Most homeless people don't end up on the streets, and don't stay homeless for very long. It's still an incredibly wretched experience, and not a sustainable one. Once you've burnt through all your friends that will lend you their couch, you will be sleeping on the street.
That bum asking you for change in SoMo? They too were sleeping on a friends' couch, before they ended up panhandling.
Worked a part-time (20-30 hours) job, had an apt, but was evicted because people I lived with partied all the time and didn't obey the rules. I didn't have enough to get a place on my own, so I slept in my car or at the homes of friends for almost a year, keeping the tech support call center job and going to school.
Though I didn't get a degree, it was a good lesson of personal responsibility, lifelong learning, and not relying on others. Ended up in software development by starting at the bottom at a tech company (customer service) and learning on my own time at night, clawing my way up. If my parents would have taken me back in (if they even would have), I'm not sure I'd be where I'm at today. I do wish I would have been able to graduate though.
This experience is sort of what leads me to view with derision tech interviews that only focus on CS/algorithms, and ignore the more common day-to-day challenges of software engineering, most of which I learned on the job.
Being young, single, and broke sucks, but the situation isn't nearly as hopeless.
I agree that making sure that person, and people like them, should have the support needed to make sure that both them and their child are fed and housed and generally taken care of. Why that means I should be implicitly subsidizing the business, instead of them being obligated to pay a living wage, is beyond me.
You're not subsidizing that company. The company is subsidizing welfare. A person making at least some money requires less money in form of social transfers.
In the end, is it better to subsidize that person's wages or have them become completely unemployable? This is not a leading question. Perhaps it would be better to just pay them to be a parent but it's not obvious to me.
I'm sorry, but I will not accept the argument that it is ok for a company to have their employees on welfare. They are a for-profit entity. I should not be subsidizing them because they choose not to pay their employees enough.
The whole minimum wage debate in the US is a shitshow. Both sides of the debate are equally idiotic. What matters is minimising the amount of welfare the government has to pay to keep people out of poverty. If the minimum wage is too low, then like you say, the government has to subsidise some companies that can afford to pay more but aren't, because there's a surplus of labor. If the minimum wage is too high, then people that would otherwise be employed become unemployed, and stop generating any wealth, which results in the government having to pay more welfare overall.
This is a complex problem that needs to be solved using large amounts of data. Arguments like yours barely scratch the surface.
And I disagree. I believe there is. At the very least, I believe that a company should not be relying on labor subsidized by welfare.
So you are saying that an external force should make companies pay different wages to different employees depending on what a particular person needs for their standard of living?
Also it is possible to live without welfare (even if you qualify) if your expenses are low, but require welfare if your expenses are high. So it would also follow that two employees of equal value to a company would be paid differently with the larger amount going to the one who is living in more expensive housing.
Rather than students attending community college and becoming homeless either from those costs, or from having gone to a "four year" university that forced them into debt.
The number does not surprise me, considering there is a 1 in 7 chance a community college student will finish [1]. This stat was one of the reasons I altered my class to allow 3 hours of open lab time to work on homework with me available. I had a number of non-traditional students (former military, GEDs, single mothers). When they were not in school, they were working (or dealing with kids). We can joke about how computer science students are night owls working on their assignments for long hours, but that seems like an arbitrary ceiling when you have someone that doesn't fit the "young adult that has free time" mold. Hell, its the motivator for my PhD research, making CS work easier to understand/complete.
Now, I will also say, this study is glossing over "Pell chasers", who only sign up for community college to get the Pell grant and then never show up again. My initial thick skin came from building a rapport with students only to see them vanish as soon as that check came. It doesn't help they can do this for 9 semesters before getting in "trouble" (no legal trouble, just no more free money). At my school, you had to show up to class once (first day when no one lectures) to get your money.
I will say that teaching CC was very interesting and rewarding. I've met deadbeats, Pell chasers, former prisoners, former crack heads, and geniuses that dropped out of HS. Just showing them you actually cared about their learning could be the world to them - some are scamming the system, but some truly don't want to drive a forklift for the rest of their lives.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2010/02/02/most-community-colle...
Edit - Fixed some numbers I had wrong.
(P.S. i then got a Bachelor of Engineering from a 4 year college, interned at Stanford University, was a GSoC fellow, got a lead iOS developer job at a startup in NYC making ALMOST 6 figures, got kicked out of the country for not getting selected at the H1B, worked at a startup in Paris, quit the startup in Paris because it was boring, and spent the last 6 months burning through my saving while living in Paris to build a startup without business model. I am now nearly homeless, but working freelance while nearly ready to launch my startup. Almost homeless, though!)
Did you know lipstick causes breast cancer, given that nearly 80% of people who get breast cancer wear lipstick?
I might be crazy, my mum didn't get me tested.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about employer cutbacks to employee training programs? It seems to me they're shifting those costs to tax payers...
Odor developed from more than two days of failing to bathe with soap is apparent to all but the most extremely smell-impaired (there are some people who can smell very little or nothing). Wearing deodorant themselves makes people drastically more sensitive to others' body odor.
The only plausible explanation for the stylist's vacation-plans conversation is that he or she was doing their best to treat you respectfully, tolerating the odor.
As far as "should society impose body odor norms on everyone?", I am unsure. It is likely if we all stopped using deodorant, we would tolerate body odor much more. However, you are stuck in this reality, where people in confined spaces are expected to wash with soap and apply deodorant on a regular basis. I assure you that almost everyone can detect body odor. It's not voluntary; it is a large amount of input to their nose.
And I can smell the deodorant, the detergent on their clothes and other scents that people with more conventional lives are either unaware of or do not object to. I find these smells objectionable. Meanwhile, rabbits and birds are unbothered by hanging near me. Animals operate on a basis of smell and they apparently find these chemical smells of "normal" people objectionable and I don't smell like that.
I am sleeping in a tent for health reasons. All those chemicals make me ill. I hope to return to a more conventional housing situation soon, but I will continue to avoid a lot of chemicals that other people routinely use and don't view as problematic.
Everyone smells. You might find my smell offensive. I would likely find yours offensive as well. Your assertion that you are sure that I smell having never stood next to me just makes your classist assumptions really clear to me, though I am sure you will deny it.
When these kinds of rules are made, they basically boil down to "You need to come across as middle class or upper class and this is a code for being allowed to toss anyone we feel doesn't fit, if we so desire." It was an aggressively enforced rule in one library where the head librarian was basically a lying psycho bitch. We once got told "We are getting complaints" not 30 seconds after we sat down. Another library in the same system did not enforce this rule and they were nothing but nice to us. The enforcement of the rule was basically a Jim Crow type practice applied to the poor.
The only plausible explanation for the stylist's vacation-plans conversation is that he or she was doing their best to treat you respectfully, tolerating the odor.
Or, alternately, that I didn't particularly smell.
Using non-human animals as a benchmark is not going to help you in any way. The scope of this discussion is humans in the United States.
You are permitted to disagree, but this doesn't change reality. The arbitrary nature of your treatment is due to the tolerance of the "nice" library. The "psycho bitch" (way to promote tolerance, dude!) head librarian was also thinking of her own welfare and ability to concentrate on her duties.
Please also recognize that most of the poor in the United States do have access to soap and water. I dispute that anyone making the median household income is middle-class or upper class.
I feel for you and your circumstances. You do appear to care about how other people's behavior affects you. You appear to have less regard about how your choices and behavior affects other people. Then again, this is completely understandable and justifiable considering how comfortable their lives are in comparison to yours. It doesn't make it correct.
You are in no way taking anything I am saying at all seriously. You seem blind to your own biases and they are incredibly offensive. The person cutting my hair merely being polite and tolerating my smell is NOT "the only plausible explanation."
I have had people tell me to my face they thought I was a tourist. I am not misreading politeness as something else.
So, I think I am done talking with you. Your remarks utterly fail to meet any kind of baseline civility and respect for me as a human being. I'm homeless, so you think you know all there is to know about me based on that one detail and don't confuse you with the facts, your mind is made up.
I think the only thing "uncivil" about my perspective is that you disagree with it. And that's fine. I think people in unfortunate circumstances have lots of leeway to feel anger and express it.
Who knows, maybe you are outside of my office building right now, and I'll be another faceless programmer drone to put a dollar in your cup.
I don't panhandle. This is yet another case of you making incredibly offensive assumptions about me and feeling zero obligation whatsoever to own it or even vaguely attempt to pretend to be respectful.
I do freelance writing, I blog and I do resume editing. That fact is easily determined.
When I was in downtown San Diego, I showered almost every single day at either Neil Good or Rachel's. After I left downtown but was still in San Diego County, I typically went to the beach a few times a week to clean up.
So, when I was being told to leave the library in downtown San Diego (for supposedly smelling), I was showering daily. It was bullshit.
I have a serious health condition. I sometimes do smell, but not specifically because I haven't showered. I actually smelled a lot worse back when I had a corporate job and an apartment because I was a lot sicker. But I had a more conventional lifestyle, so I never got accused of smelling. This is part of why I am so confident that accusations that "you smell" are merely code for "no homeless people." There are plenty of people who smell bad, but that isn't a reason to exclude them from a public space. That accusation does get used to exclude homeless people.
I am not saying that homeless people never smell. I am saying that a) everyone has some kind of smell, to some degree b) smells being "offensive" are largely subjective, not objective and c) objecting to "smell" is often not really about the smell but about the fact that the person is homeless.
If we routinely threw people out of public spaces for having a strong odor, regardless of other details, then I wouldn't think this was basically a Jim Crow practice. But when "smell" gets used as the reason to exclude a poor person but is never used to exclude other people who may also be equally disgusting, then it really isn't about the smell per se. That's just basically a cover story.
Is that clearer?
I have encountered smelly people in libraries, but I see no reason to gainsay Mz about this.
People who tell others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps should try to make sure these people at least have boots.
If your GPA drops below a certain point, they withdraw aid and you become homeless. Simple as that.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-h...