Santorum, of course, was intentionally misrepresenting some innocuous remarks from the President about easing access to college, junior college, or technical school in order to culture-bait over evil librul college perfessers who want indoctrinate your children or some such nonsense.
Although he didn't have to, Obama went ahead and answered the absurd criticism anyway.
Speaking to the National Governors Association, Obama called on the group to protect public investment in education at a time of shrinking state budgets so that teachers remain in the classroom.
Obama did not mention GOP presidential candidate Santorum by name in his remarks. But the president paused to say he wanted to make a specific point when it came to higher education.
“When I speak about higher education we’re not just talking about a four-year degree,” Obama said. “We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic training beyond what they received in high school.”
At the end of this meaningless back and forth over higher learning, we're all a little dumber from having been witness at all.
What gets lost, though, in all this nobly un-snobbish rhetoric about the prosaic virtue of job training and trade schools and so forth is that the policy we're really discussing is pumping more money into the "for-profit college" racket.
One of the most sickening kleptocratic rackets to come down the pike are the for-profit “educators.” It’s a scheme that is almost totally enabled by Government funding via Title IV loans. The loans fit the modern American model of getting people heavily in debt, who then have little ability to pay the loan back. This has been described as “Sub prime Goes to College”.
But until that bubble pops, if it ever does, we'll just keep shoveling free money to the ITTs and DeVrys of the world regardless of whether they're doing their enrollees any good.
The performance of these schools in terms of keeping students around, or even graduating them, let alone preparing them for meaningful employment is poor. The next charts shows the churn and burn nature of these schools. The goal is to get the student to the first day of class, which immediately kicks in the liability for the tuition. If he or she quits a week later it makes no never-mind to the school.
Click the link to see the charts referred to in the quote. That is if you have the sort of fancy book learning that enables you to decipher charts and graphs, anyway. Sounds suspiciously snobby to me.
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