Obamas free community college program has a catch
The article explains that even though the pitch seemed full proof and to benefit everyone it still had a very important catch to it. Obama proposed an idea of making community colleges free of tuition for possibly a full four years with few requirements. These requirements these include; a minimum and maintained GPA of 2.5, as well as being at least a half time student. There is one other requirement that is causing controversy and questioning, that requirement is that the student can not come from a family with an annual income of over $200000. The author of the article then goes on to explain his opinion that capping the program based on income does the exact opposite of making it a universal program like high school which is how the idea is proposed.
Obama proposed a pitch to make community college free of tuition, but certain major requirements must be met to be eligible for this if it is put into effect. The overall goal of this idea is to make community college as universal as high school for at least two years and maybe all four. The first requirement is to at least maintain a GPA of 2.5. The second requirement is to at least be a half time student. The third major requirement is to come from a family that has an annual gross income of $200000 or less. Overall I like the main idea of this concept and think that it has great benefits but there are also some points dealing with it that I do not agree with and that I think damage the main idea.
I think that this proposal would be good for the US. There are a lot of students who face poverty and cannot afford community college and also didn’t do well enough to get thousands of dollars’ worth of scholarships. Just because students are unable to afford college doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to at least get a college education, I’ve always thought that this was really unfair. Universities shouldn’t necessarily be free of tuition because there is a lot more to a university than there is a community college being that there are a lot of dorms and a lot more clubs and sports involved along with more education opportunities involved. Community colleges should be free of tuition because there should be some sort of basic single major college education that is offered that everyone can be eligible for. I think that a lot of the students that graduate high school but end up not going to college is because they’re afraid of the debut and student loans that come with furthering their education in college. I think that eliminating this would benefit the whole country in the long run and make us more successful as a nation.
The requirement of coming from a family with an AGI of 200000 or less is what corrupts the idea. The idea was proposed as being one that college at the community level would be tuition free and as universal as high school is. The AGI cap makes this untrue. No matter what your family income is, you public high school GED is tuition free. In my opinion it is wrong to prevent the wealthy people from this privilege because they cannot control what their family income is as kids, and it puts kids that have to pay for their own college tuition without help from their wealthy parents at a major disadvantage. If this idea was truly supposed to be as universal as high school it wouldn’t have this requirement.
I do like the other requirement of maintaining a GPA of at least a 2.5. This is at the perfect level because it eliminates the kids that go through high school without caring and either just doing enough to pass, or just failing in general, but it is also at the level where students can try and some what struggle through high school and still be eligible for free tuition. I do not agree with the requirement of at least having to attend half time. There are a good amount of students that are enrolled in community colleges because they work and are unable to go to a university because of time and money. There are some of those that work so much that they can only take one or two classes at a time. Most students are part time because of work and having so little time to put schooling into as well, not because of laziness which is why I feel this requirement was put in. The reason why I know this is because I happen to be one of students who has a full time job and hardly has anytime for school at all. If the proposal was pushed and I wasn’t eligible because I didn’t have enough time to take more classes it would seem really unfair to me.
I think that the overall idea of this concept is great. It will help out a lot of hardworking, deserving students that previously wouldn’t have been able to attend college. This is something that should have been into effect a really long time ago but its better late than never. This proposal still has its bugs and things that can be modified to make it better yet, but overall I think once it is put into effect that it will make a lot of people happy and lift a very heavy weight off of students shoulders that plan on attending community colleges.
Schlesinger Perspective Fairy Tale Analysis
Arthur Schlesinger has a unique perspective on fairy tales and how the lessons in them benefit the children that read them. His idea behind fairy tales is to “teach children what the unconsciously know”. Prime examples being that human nature is not innately good, that conflict is real, and that life can be harsh before it is happy. I think that Charles Perrault’s version of Cinderella provides great examples of all three of these lessons throughout the story.
There are plenty of examples in Charles Perrault’s version of Cinderella to show that human nature is not innately good. Cinderella is the daughter of a man who married for the second time a woman whom had two-step daughters. The most obvious example is how her stepmother and two stepsisters treat her. The stepmother and stepsisters couldn’t handle the pure goodness of Cinderella so they used her as their servant and their housemaid. She was unable to go to her father for help because he was under complete control of his wife and would treat her just the same as they would. They gave her all of the hardest and most undesirable chores around the house while the two step sisters were hardly given any house duties. The sister’s rooms had the most desirable beds and accessories while Cinderella was forced to sleep on a bed made of straw in the garret. These are perfect examples to show that human nature is not innately good because is shows that people will do anything and everything they can to make themselves look better even if it means tearing down someone else. Another example is when it says “people would laugh to see a cinderwench at a ball”. Cinderwench is another name the sisters called her because when she was not busy working around the house she would sit by the chimney among the cinders. This is a good example because the sisters know that she wants to attend the ball and get ready for it but instead they have her helping them prepare for it by having her as their hair dresser and stylist.
Conflict is very significant in Perrault’s version of Cinderella. The majority of the conflict comes from her family; everyone in the house she lives in treats her horribly. To her stepsisters, stepmother and her father Cinderella is just an impoverished servant to them. She does all the chores, and does all the hard work but gets nothing in return. Her sisters have no responsibilities whatsoever and get whatever they want. Along with the problems in her family, Cinderella has other problems she has to face. The prince sent out an invitation to a ball to everyone in the area. Cinderella wants to go but has no presentable clothing to go to such an event and doesn’t have the wealth to acquire any. On top of that her sisters are making her help them prepare for them to go to the ball. Cinderella ends up getting a dress and everything else she needs to go to the ball from her godmother who is a fairy but not without a catch. She has until midnight at the ball, once the clock hits midnight everything that her godmother granted her will go away and she will be left with nothing but her rags of clothing that she wears while doing chores at the house. The first night of the ball went great but the second night Cinderella lost track of time and had to run away before the clock hit midnight. In the process of this she had lost one of her slippers.
In my opinion, Cinderella is the perfect example to show that life can be very harsh before it ends up becoming happy. Cinderella becomes a servant and a housemaid after her father marries a woman with two daughters. The family looks at her as a servant and nothing more and treats her like one as well. She is to do whatever she is told by the family and does all the chores around the house. She is impoverished and only has old ragged clothing that she does her work in. She sleeps on a straw bed and on her down time goes and sits by the chimney among the cinders. Once the family gets word of the ball invitation sent out to everyone by the prince it basically takes over there lives with all the time and effort put in to get ready for it. Cinderella helps the sisters prepare for the ball by dressing their hair and providing the fashion advice. She wishes she could go to the ball but has no acceptable clothing to do so. Her fairy godmother sees her crying and asks her what the problem is. After Cinderella explains the godmother turns her old rags into the most beautiful dress she had ever seen along with the prettiest glass slippers in the world, a pumpkin into a gilded couch, six mice turned into six horses, a rat into a coachman, and six lizards into six foot men to escort her. The only catch was to leave the ball before midnight or everything will disappear and go to normal. The first night of the ball went well and everyone including the prince says that she was the most beautiful girl there. The prince danced with her the whole night and she still made it home by midnight. The second night of the ball she had an even nicer dress on and once again danced with the prince the whole night. She lost track of time and had to run away from the ball before the clock hit midnight and in doing so lost one of her slippers. The prince then ordered that the slipper be tried on every girl until the perfect fit is found. Cinderella was the last one to try the slipper on, once she did the prince saw it was a perfect fit and ended up marrying her. All of the hardships she previously faced were gone and she was now royalty as the princes’ wife.
All in all Charles Perrault’s version of Cinderella does a great job of explaining important lessons to the children that read it. I think that it is a great story to read because it does teach kids that the human nature is not innately good and people will do what ever they can to benefit themselves. It shows that you cannot go through life untested and without conflict. The lesson I feel is most important also happens to be the one that I think is the most well outlined in Cinderella, and that is that life is or can be very harsh before it is happy. If children can grasp these three lessons at a young age after reading this fairy tale I think that it would eventually change their outlook on the way their life is going and help them in the long run.
Income Inequality
What is Income Equality and Why?
In the United States, income inequality, or the gap between rich and poor, has been growing remarkably for some 30 years. Today Americans arising from poverty to the middle class and the middle class arising to the wealthy class are shrinking. People with higher incomes are obtaining a large share of the nation’s total income. Income equality affects the most important aspects of the American life such as happiness, health, housing, segregation, and education. The growing gap between the rich and the poor may be the most important change in our lifetime.
The American people need to understand the inequalities of income and review the statistics that have been completed. They need to know why the inequality is increasing and what measures need to take place to reverse this effect. We lack a clear understanding of how and why we arrived at this point. The income gap has been blamed on everything from computers to immigration. Working Americans work hard to prevent themselves from going from the middle class to poverty and work even harder to get rich. It is harder to rise from poverty in the United States than in any other comparable developed country. Nowhere in the industrialized world is there a bigger gap between wage growth and productivity growth over the last two business cycles.
Income inequality exists in all three of the social classes but each began a little differently. In the Industrial Revolution the lower classes had earned their living through jobs in agriculture whereas now they are working in factories. Factory work was usually much easier than working in fields, women and children joined the workforce in huge numbers. Wages were very low and even with an entire family it was difficult to earn a good living. The factory work was also dirty and unsafe for the workers causing medical issues. The children working in the factories kept them from receiving an education.
The middle class grew from the industrial revolution as the growth of new businesses and factories created thousands of new jobs. The new jobs brought shopkeepers, accountants, and merchants. They were able to enjoy amenities like furniture and fine clothing. The middle class were more educated and were also able to educate their children. They had a comfortable life.
The upper class grew with the new technologies as the factories were able mass-produce goods and the goods were sold cheap and quickly. The manufacturing and trade businesses were owned by the rich. The rich got even richer and the middle class that were able to take ownership in factories moved into the upper class. The wealth allowed the upper class to build large homes and mansions, fine art, and luxury items.
There is still a growing trend of income inequality. The inequality in the labor force is widening. The current inequality of labor income in the United States, as Thomas Piketty concludes, “is probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world, including societies in which skill disparities were extremely large.” There is a decreasing amount of national income that is actually flowing to wages and earnings. The real incomes of the middle class family household increased by about 25% although the middle-income workers make no more now than they did thirty years ago. The real income for the rich which is about 1% of the American people tripled in the last three decades.
Income inequality in the United States mostly focuses on race or gender. Black/white and male/female income inequalities persist today. The median income for black households is 38 percent lower than for white households. The median income for women working full-time is 23 percent lower than men working full-time. Although one would think, the black/white income gap has not diminished in the past thirty years. The failure to decrease this gap indicates that something in the American society has possibly stayed wrong. The male/female income inequality has actually shrunk by nearly half since the 1980s. The male/female income gap will continually shrink as the United States women are becoming better educated than men. The female-to-male ratio is currently 57% to 43% as undergraduates at colleges and universities. Since 2009, the majority of doctoral degrees awarded in the United States went to women.
Another big factor driving the increase in income inequality is the stagnation in income in the typical American household. From the end of 1947 and the later 1970s, incomes in the United States in the lower class were rising faster than the upper class; therefore the income inequality was declining and the lowest income group saw the largest gains. Since this period, the income inequality has reversed. Poor wage growth is also a contributing factor to the American household. The average hourly wage adjusting for inflation rose at a much higher percent in the twenty year period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. Since the early 1970s the average hourly rate rose at a very small percentage.
Income inequality is also caused by the dramatic rise in CEO pay in recent decades. CEO pay has more than doubled in 2009 from the average CEO pay for the decade of the 1990s. The CEO pay average ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades in the mid-20th century.
Politics also play a role in income inequality. Public policies are put in place to help poor Americans to have a chance to move in to the middle class or to ensure greater security for those that already are in the middle-class. The investment in education and creating good jobs can also retain and strengthen the middle class. Although today, no amount of individual effort or self-improvement can guarantee a secure middle-class lifestyle. The difficulties American families have in paying for education from head start all the way through college. The low and middle class students and their parents now pay or borrow a lot more for a college degree than in the past.
It really amazes me that even though our country is so advanced and has grown so much over the years that we still have problems like income inequality existing. What surprises me even more is that a lot of the inequality is still based off of gender and race, two issues that you would think that we would have gotten past the first time there was controversy over them. I cant understand how we haven't figured out a way to overcome these major problems. Hopefully soon the problems will be gone and everyone can be treated and payed according based off just what they do instead of who they are.
Work Cited
Gordon, Colin (2014) “Growing Apart” A Political History of American Inequality. Retrieved April 19, 2015 from http://www.scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of -american-inequality/index
Lobley, Pam “Differences Between Wealthy, Middle Class and Poor in the Industrial Revolution.” Retrieved April 20, 2015, from http://classroom.synonym.com/differences-between-wealthy-middle-class-poor-industrial-revolution
Salam, Reihan (2015). The Upper Middle Class is Ruining America. Retrieved April 20, 2015, from http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/the_upper_middle_class...
Rapoport,Miles and Wheary, Jennifer (2013. October 14). Running In Place: Where the Middle Class and Poor Meet. Retrieved April 20, 2015, from http://www.demos.org/publication/runnin-place-where-middle-class-and-poor-meet
Noah, Timothy. The Great Divergence. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.
Garson, Barbara. Down the Up Escalator. New York: Doubleday, 2013.
Piketty, Thomas (2014). Capital in the Twenty First Century. Published by Editions du Seuil, Harvard University Press
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Income Inequality in the United States Retrieved April 21, 2015,
