sundries

[rm]

Last night Patty and I had a lovely dinner at the outdoor restaurant on the West Side. We haven't really formulated specific/definite weekend plans yet, but we have a lot of ideas. Movies? Boats? Hiding out at home which we would like to do more of while awake? (we're both somewhat inexplicably exhausted, but we think the heat is making us sleep less well).

The first of the kidney stone related medical bills as arrived. Over $500 for the ambulance, which is less than I suspected. Apparently I just have to sign some stuff and they will send it to my insurance company, although I'm highly doubtful about how much of this the insurance company is going to pay (although since it was called in for by a doctor at the urgent care I was at, that may help, but there are deductable issues too). Sigh.

The Art of Manliness is, as recently noted, often evil, but they have an installment in their continuing series on wardrobe and its care today.

Lt. Dan Choi was discharged yesterday under DADT.

The ranking of US residents ages 25 - 34 with college degrees has dropped to 12th of 36 developed nations. People are freaking out about the future of US competitiveness. I'm wondering what college degrees matter when they increasingly seem to teach things that should have been learned in high school, or earlier. Luckily, everyone's general sense is that it's all of US education, from K on up, that needs to be improved. Too bad about Texas and those textbooks then, huh?

Despite a long-standing Supreme Court ruling that immigration status/violations cannot be used to deny a child access to our public schools, 1 in 5 school districts in New York are effectively doing just that.

The rooftop bars of Manhattan: more challenging than you'd think.

There's going to be another benefit for Kimlee and her husband Chris this weekend. Chris recently suffered a traumatic brain injury, and the expenses are adding up.

Thanks to the near unending linkage to the SDCC WBC counter-protest, most of the ads on my LJ today about how many college credits you need for ordination from this or that religion-focused educational entity.

Comments

[sethg]

According to the Census Bureau (table 2c), the difference between a high-school diploma and a bachelor’s degree is over $2,000 a month in earning power for full-time workers. When you consider that people without at least an associate degree are significantly less likely to have steady jobs at all (table 2e), the difference is even more stark.

I don’t know how much this difference reflects the academic things people learn in college, how much it reflects that anyone who has gone to college has probably learned something about sitting still and not conspicuously mouthing off to one’s elders, and how much is just signalling.

It would be Good For Society if we re-established some kind of apprenticeship system, where 15–25-year-olds could spend about half their time in school and half doing some kind of actual work. Unfortunately I’m not sure how such a system could work economically, because employers would need some kind of financial incentive to put apprentices in positions where they would actually learn something.

[graene.livejournal.com]

I have to wonder how much that data is skewed by age, because there are still quite a few baby-boomer era workers for whom a college degree did make a significant difference in earning potential. Otoh, I do believe that people without degrees now have a harder time getting a job. My g-dmother once told me the whole point of a bachelor's degree to a potential employer was "here's the proof I can stick with and complete a long-term project."

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's also probably effectively screwed by race, gender and all sorts of things too. It may not be the college degree that's making people earn more so much as it is other demograhic factors taht correleate more frequently with said college degree.