Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Starbucks and free online courses
TO THE EDITOR:
Regarding
“Lattes and College Degrees” by Joe Nocera (Op-Ed, June 17).
It is commendable that Starbucks is
offering employees a free, on-line education at Arizona State University. An on-line degree is better than no degree
at all but it is not the equivalent of attending college in person. A two-tiered system in which the wealthy get
live classes and the rest get online courses is not really progress. A better
way to help those students coming from the lower half of the income strata is
to raise their family incomes and for states to increase funding back to levels
in the past.
In
1963, when I started college, the average manufacturing income was about $4500
per year which translates to about $34,000 today, close to the actual average
of about $37,500. My 1963 tuition
represented about 8% of the average manufacturing annual income but today would
represent 17% at that same university. Colleges can do more to hold down costs
but without addressing income disparity and decreased state funding, their
choices are either to leave the lower 50% of income earners behind or offer
them less than the upper tier gets.
Submitted
to NY Times 6-17-14
# posted by Rockdoc @ 9:06 AM 
