Aaron Carroll — Why America Needs Foreign Medical Graduates

The American system relies to a surprising extent on foreign medical graduates, most of whom are citizens of other countries when they arrive. By any objective standard, the United States trains far too few physicians to care for all the patients who need them. We rank toward the bottom of developed nations with respect to medical graduates per population.…

Although many feared that coverage expansions from the Affordable Care Act might lead to an overwhelmed physician work force, that didn’t happen. That doesn’t mean that America doesn’t have a shortage of physician services, especially when it comes to the care of the oldest, the poorest and the most geographically isolated among us. Even though we know foreign medical graduates care for those patients disproportionately, we make it very difficult for many born and trained elsewhere to practice here. Some Americans need these doctors desperately. Evidence suggests that policies should be made to attract them, not deter them.

This is a New York Times piece.

The "solution" of importing medical personnel is completely bonkers. 

First, and most importantly, it deprives the people of other countries of an important real resources for which they receive exactly nothing. It is grossly unfair.

Secondly, the US is perfectly capable of recruiting and training its own medical personnel as one of the most highly develop nations. 

This should be a scandal of incompetence in resource management and scamming off the rest of the world.

The Incidental Economist
Why America Needs Foreign Medical Graduates
Aaron Carroll

Bill Raden — Free Tuition Was Once the Norm in California

For an increasing number of education and political leaders, bringing debt-free higher education back to California is long overdue. In 2015 alone, over half of UC and CSU seniors graduated with a staggering $1.3 billion debt load. Since 2004, California’s public university students have collectively racked up student debt in excess of $12 billion. That liability has been a catastrophe, according to UC San Francisco medical professor Stanton Glantz, president of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations.

“Even if you take a fairly conservative approach, it’s had huge negative effects on the California economy,” he explains in a phone interview, “because people who graduate with this ridiculous amount of debt have to delay starting families, starting businesses, and it just becomes a weight on the whole economy. … The same people, if you look at the state as a whole, are going to end up paying for higher ed. It’s just, [with free tuition] you give it to everybody, and then the society recoups the costs over the long run by creating more wealth, [rather than] what we’re doing now, which is where you take the people who are actually getting educated and saddle them with [the cost].”...

The argument that a university degree benefits both the graduate and society has been made repeatedly over the years. For the college graduate, it means significantly increased lifetime earnings; for the state, increased tax revenue and reduced costs for social welfare programs and incarceration. A 2012 study by UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues estimated that ongoing returns to the state from UC and CSU graduates averaged $12 billion annually, “well above the general fund expenditures for the UC, CSU and CCC systems combined.”...

Education is institutionalized as a public good in the US and matriculation is required until completing secondary education or attaining majority.

Why not higher education, especially in a competitive world where the US is now trying desperately to stay on top while the emerging world (read China) is breathing down its neck. But soon enough it will also be India, and then....

 AlterNet
Free Tuition Was Once the Norm in California
Bill Raden | Capital and Main

Russian students dominate at the computer programming olympics — and American computer science students are unsurprised

Eyeopener, although not surprising for those that have been paying attention to education.

Salon

Russian students dominate at the computer programming olympics — and American computer science students are unsurprised

Samuel Blackstone

Michael Hudson — Another Housing Bubble?

Another good one from Michael Hudson. Covers student debt too.

Michael Hudson
Another Housing Bubble?
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

DIMON: 'Something went wrong [with education], and the leaders collectively are responsible'

Jamie Dimon is worried about a lost generation.

The CEO and chairman of JPMorgan has spoken about a "national catastrophe" in education, and a generation that has been left behind.... 

"There's always going to be an elite. You can have an elite in a communist society. It is the leaders, something went wrong, and the leaders collectively are responsible.…" 

Business Insider
DIMON: 'Something went wrong [with education], and the leaders collectively are responsible'

Matt Turner

Ray Dalio — There is a human tragedy taking place in America

Like Dimon, Dalio is focused on the education system. Dalio cited a study his wife funded in Connecticut that found 22% of students in the state are disengaged or disconnected. In his annual letter to shareholders, Dimon said "we are creating generations of citizens who will never have a chance."

"Now you think not only is that a human tragedy in terms of those kids, but that's also going to be a terrible social tragedy," Dalio told Henry Blodget. "When you look at some of the educational things that can be done that make such a world of difference to people, it's a terrible waste of resources and inefficiency. We have a problem with our human infrastructure."...

Business Insider

Ray Dalio: There is a human tragedy taking place in America

Matt Turner

David F. Ruccio — Only in America

Defunding everything in education that doesn't lead to high wage employment. Nudge, nudge.

Liberalism? That's neoclassical economics. Culture? Who needs it?

Occasional Links & Commentary
Only in America
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Yves Smith — Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?

I never dreamed that a class I took in college, The Politics of Popular Education, which covered the nineteenth century in France and England, would prove to be germane in America. I didn’t have any particular interest in the topic; the reason for selecting the course was that the more serious students picked their classes based on the caliber of the instructor, and this professor, Kate Auspitz, got particularly high marks. The course framed both the policy fights and the broader debate over public education in terms of class, regional, and ideological interests. 

The participants in these struggles were acutely aware that the struggle over schooling was to influence the future of society: what sort of citizens would these institutions help create? 

As the post below on the march of school privatization in Wisconsin demonstrates, those concerns are remarkably absent from current debates. The training of children is simply another looting opportunity, like privatizing parking meters and roads. The objective is yet another transfer from some of the remaining members of the middle class, public school teachers, to the promoters. And this process also produces an important side benefit for socially unenlightened capitalists: that of slowly breaking one of the last influential unions. 

And lest you had any doubt, despite the claim that charter schools help children, the evidence is that it doesn’t. Moreover, the pattern in capitalism American style is towards ever-greater crapification. So imagine what private schools, where the operators are on relatively good behavior because the project is still in its demonstration phase, look like in ten years.

Making America more competitive.

Moreover, international comparisons show that higher teacher pay is strongly correlated with better educational outcomes, which should hardly seem surprising. Higher compensation, if nothing else, is a sign that society confers some stature to teachers, which helps in attracting capable people into that role.

The pay incentive apparently only works at the CEO level in the neoliberal concept of motivation.

Naked Capitalism
Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?
Yves Smith

Kyla Calvert — Number of international students on U.S. campuses at an all time high

Overall international students were 4.2 percent of those enrolled in the country’s post secondary institutions, a higher portion than ever before. 

While the number of internationals students coming to the U.S. has increased in most of the last dozen years, that growth picked up during the recession. Schools like the University of California’s campuses looked to other countries for students who pay the full sticker price to attend.…

All three countries [Brazil, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia] offer national scholarships for students who want to study abroad, according to IIE.

PBS Newshour

Number of international students on U.S. campuses at an all time high

Kyla Calvert

Also

There were 274,439 students from China enrolled at US universities in 2013-2014. The country is still responsible for sending the most students to the US, largely because the demand for higher education is greater than the number of seats available in quality institutions in China.…

For the last school year, India accounted for 11.6% of all international students in the US, with 102,673 students. This is the first overall increase of Indian students in the last few years, which is likely attributable to a few factors, Bhandari says. Firstly, there is a growing college- and- graduate-aged population in India, and like China, India does not have the educational infrastructure to provide quality, graduate-level education to every student who wants it; the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology have an acceptance rate of less than 2%.…

There are many connections between education in Iran and the US—Iran puts a premium on postgraduate education, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has more US-educated PhD’s in his cabinet than US President Barack Obama does.

Quartz
Why Iran and Brazil are sending more college students to the US
Sonali Kohli

Diane Ravitch — Public Education: Who Are the Corporate Reformers?

This is a hugely important issue socially, politically and economically and it is not a single issue but rather a web of interconnected issues touching almost every sphere of life beginning with early childhood rearing. Education shapes a society more than anything else.

The great value of public education that is more or less standardized is that it provides the basis for a common culture, which is extremely significant in a pluralistic and multicultural society like the US. Without a "common core," and I don't mean the common core as it is used presently in education, the society can be expected to be become increasingly divergent and divisive, as well as layered.

However, achieving a common core socially is not the same as introducing a common core into the curriculum and teaching methodology as presently proposed. Cookie cutter approaches don't work at that well other than with cookies and other items that can be standardized. Human beings cannot be standardized and it would probably not be optimal even if they could be.

We need maximum diversity compatible with foundational unity. Entering the global age, that foundational unity must be the universality of humanity as a species that is ecologically interdependent with other species and the environment.

Reading, writing and 'rithmetic will not longer cut it. Nor will emphasis on STEM, especially at the expense of a liberal education.

The primary goal of education in a pluralistic multicultural democracy must be oriented to self-governance by the population itself with a view to common purpose. This is stated quite eloquently in the preamble to the US constitution:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The educational system that America has today is a holdover from the past and it may not be suitable for the new era that the country and world is embarking upon. We need to be asking what the opportunities and challenges are and how to meet them agilely in a time of when the pace of change is accelerating exponentially. New opportunities are bringing new levels of challenge that are orders of magnitude greater than previously experienced.

Is the educational system keeping pace? Would greater privatization increase the opportunities or exacerbate the challenges? Can the present system be reformed from within, or is an overhaul required? What questions do we need to be asking? I don't think we are asking the right questions yet. People seem to be too fixed on providing answers before the problem has been explored sufficiently.

Bill Moyers & Co.
Public Education: Who Are the Corporate Reformers?
Diane Ravitch

See also, Public Schools for Sale?