TLDR; i apologize For being too lazy to read, and too dense to understand, your in depth explanation
MSU featured in this NYT article on education funding
- Thread starter Faustdog
- Start date
Most of our research isn’t spent on bull**** and we are not a university that parades liberal policies, so we’re most likely in the clear of retaining a majority percentage of our funding
Do you understand that you are the most stupid useful idiots yet to exist
We give money to countries that goes to politicians, not the people. We influence nothing that way.
G D it. I’m all in. Let’s go full pinko.
See Where Federal Dollars Flow to Universities Around the Country
The Trump administration has targeted a few elite universities with its threats to freeze funding. But many more schools around the country are vulnerable.www.nytimes.com
We spent about $150 million in federal funding in 2023. Y'all try not to turn this into a **** show.
And my boomer generation is the most selfish generation of Americans to date with our $31 trillion of accumulated federal debt being exhibit 1 in support thereof.
It’s already hard times ahead. State legislature has pulled the purse strings closed. Higher tuition is in the future but the tighter funds means things like the extension service get less and less funding
And when shelves at the walmarts are empty in a couple months, some folks are going to realize some things
The argument used to be that they would fight to restrain the budget, but once the budget was set, they'd fight for Mississippi to get as much as they could. That was probably always ********, but obviously meant nothing once they stopped trying to pass budgets with regular order. I think that was sometime in the 90's.
Have you seen how fat we are? Food security aint our problem.
I don't disagree with the general point, but this is at least research that has plausible spillover effects that could help the US. I assume with it being at MSU, it is real scientific research and not just a grift where they are funneling money to people and doing "research".
Can't remember who the quote is from, but it's something along the lines of "When china comes to help, we get infrastructure. When the US comes to help, we get lectures."
We really do have an incredibly dumb set of "elites", but so does everybody else. China basically doomed itself because its leaders were too stupid to understand the basic math that limiting everybody to one child from two parents would cause a steep population decline. But they are not as affluent so they can't afford to be as stupid as we are on things like infrastructure and energy.
We actually do. Some may end up in their pockets. Diplomacy isn't about financial efficiency. Our long wars in the Muslim world have done more to harm our reputation and those cost trillions. This and foreign aid is peanuts
13.5 percent of American households are food insecure. That’s about 47 million people.
Thats actually been rising in the last several years.
The point I was making is that long-serving MS conservative Republicans who supported limited government and tax cuts were bringing home tons of federal dollars. That's good for Mississippi so to hell with principles.
You can't blame it all on Baby Boomers. Gen X has been sucking Government money for 59 years. Gen Y has been sucking Government money for 44 years. Gen Z has been sucking Government money for 28 years. The truth is every person in this country has been getting some type of Government money in one shape or another. Anything from Child tax credit and free smart phones to public education. Our government has run up a National Debt for a lot of bull **** that has nothing to do with just Boomers. Also, the money we waste overseas is just asinine. You name something and I am pretty sure the Government spends money on it.
I don't doubt that there are people that are actually food insecure using a definition that most reasonable people would agree on, but I don't know where to find reliable data on it. Too many people involved are pushing an agenda and not trying to provide good data. The USDA unfortunately is part of that problem.
Our debt and deficit could be fixed relatively easily, if it were not for the fact that Boomers have promised themselves that future taxpayers were going to pay them a **** ton of money in Social security and medicare benefits while not actually producing those future taxpayers.
So certainly plenty of people to blame for our politics, but Boomers are uniquely bad and selfish as a generation.
I’ve done enough work with food pantries and other organizations that get food to school age children in large cities to know that number is probably pretty close to reality.
My daughter and her roommates work with kids in the Starkville area and they can tell you tons of stories about kids keeping their food/snacks at school and day care to take home to a sibling to make sure they have something to eat. A lot of times it's just sorry parents or no parents but socioeconomic issues there as well.
We did a project several years ago in Indianapolis where they give kids that have been identified by school staff as possibly underprivileged backpacks with food every day to take home. They almost always get the backpack back that same week requesting to take home food because they don’t have any at home.
There is a similar program in Starkville. The link below says that JA fed 37 children, but I think that is JA alone. Other groups support as well.
Backpack Program — Junior Auxiliary of Starkville, MS
www.jastarkville.org
Outstanding.There is a similar program in Starkville. The link below says that JA fed 37 children, but I think that is JA alone. Other groups support as well.
Backpack Program — Junior Auxiliary of Starkville, MS
Spending is a waste if it is for something a person doesn't support as a specific program/initiative or as a general concept.
Spending is smart or justified if it is for something a person supports as a specific program/initiative or as a general concept.
And when spending at a country's level is discussed, quite literally everyone will find a program/initiative or a general concept they dislike, and therefore declare that the government is wasting money.
Instead of vague and generalized complaints, or citing small fringe spending and framing it as being the norm, a more effective way to complain is to cite specific examples of significant spending and show why they are wasteful.
LOL, okay, now I see you've just been trolling with this weird heel turn lately. I thought it seemed out of the blue but I'm on board now. You're making fun of the TDS psychos by pretending to join them. Here I was playing the straight man while you were clowning. Duh, my bad bro. Carry on.
I am in general a proponent of cutting wasteful spending, but there are two reasons this is beneficial to Americans:
1) If we can show how to improve food security abroad, we can do the same here
2) If people in these countries are well fed they are less likely to start genocidal wars, creating refugees that flood to America and drain our resources.
So I look at it as paying a relatively small amount of money now to avoid having to pay a larger amount of money in the future.
I certainly believe that's exactly where you heard it.
Below are some fixes. They are reactive rather than proactive, but they are fixing the issue that exists.
I am unsure how to fix the issue so it doesnt ever exist in the first place. That is something which nobody has an answer for.
1-
The school district we enroll our kids into started providing free breakfast and lunch to all students a few years ago(been in place for a decade at some schools).
And there are 25 or so sites around the city where free lunch is provided each day in the summer(this has been in place for 40 years).
The free breakfast and lunch during the school year is a USDA program that helps fund the initiative Community Eligibility Provision(CEP). CEP works with the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program to offer this.
USDA also helps with providing the free summer meals.
- Countless long term studies, crossing race and region, show educational outcomes are higher for students that arent hungry. Further, behavior issues and classroom disruptions are lower.
- Free and easy access for all helps remove the social outcasting and stigma around receiving a free lunch that is different from everyone else's.
- Free and easy access for all helps keep the child from having to worry about if their parents are behind on lunch payments and keeps them from having to address that with their parents in the evenings.
2-
On a related note of what not to do, my state's Governor declined up to $28.8MM in federal summer food assistance that would have gone to up to 240,000 children last summer.
- She declined to participate in the Summer EBT program which gives families $40/month for a child who is eligible for free/reduced lunch.
- The justification she gave was that the benefit doesnt provide long-term solutions for food insecurity and that the funding doesnt promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity is an epidemic.
- This is a program which is fully paid for by the federal government and states just have to split the administrative cost, which would have been up to $2.2MM.
- The program was estimated to have provided up to $50MM in local economic activity for the state.
- Instead of participating in this program, she allocated $900,000 to expand some summer meal sites that provide free meals to children.
- She rejected it again for this coming summer.
So she rejected up to $28.8MM dollars that would have generated up to $50MM in economic activity and cost the state only $2.2MM in administration.
And she implemented a $900,000 program that increased meal sites by only 4%.
This is an example of political idealism over serving your state. And its an example of perfect being the enemy of good.
It's called soft power. The United States had more of it than any country on earth, until we began pissing it away.
A few points I don't think have been noted about grant funding.
Schools typically take about half of that money as overhead. They use it to build labs, hire faculty, keep the lights on. For MSU that's 75 million dollars that could potentially disappear, so that would have to be made up by state funding, increases in tuition, private fundraising, or cuts to programs. This is one reason that schools headhunt for faculty with active, well funded research programs.
Grants also typically include funding for the PIs and their graduate students. This pays the university the student's tuition and a stipend and helps fund the cost of the professor. So as a researcher I can attract the most talented students and bring them in regardless of their ability to fund their own education. If grant funding is cut, my students are going to go elsewhere, and take their tuition with them, greatly shrinking the pool of talent available for me to bring to the university.
Most university ranking systems give a lot of weight to grant attainment. If you want to improve your national rankings, you go headhunt for grant hotshots. (UT Knoxville's astronomical rise in ranking is a prime example of this). Rankings in turn attract more and larger grants, which then buys state of the art equipment for the university, and brings in higher and higher levels of expertise in faculty and support staff. That attracts both talented undergraduate and graduate students, allowing the university to be more selective in admittance to the school, which raises the student profile -= another heavily weighted factor in university rankings. It also attracts potentially lucrative partnerships for the university with private firms who need that expertise and research capacity of the university.
It's really difficult to work your way up the reputational ladder as a university, but it ain't hard to work your way down, as numerous threads on this site have noted when national rankings come out every year. Low grant-attaining universities really can't support expensive-to-offer degrees in advanced engineering and science without grants. In my field, necessary pieces of equipment like mass spectrometers or fMRIs cost millions of dollars. Good luck finding a university that is willing to buy any of that. Students in the classes I teach, both undergraduate and graduate are making use and benefiting from that equipment and my expertise (largely funded by fed grants) and are at a competitive advantage in the job market over a student who didn't have those experiences.
Schools typically take about half of that money as overhead. They use it to build labs, hire faculty, keep the lights on. For MSU that's 75 million dollars that could potentially disappear, so that would have to be made up by state funding, increases in tuition, private fundraising, or cuts to programs. This is one reason that schools headhunt for faculty with active, well funded research programs.
Grants also typically include funding for the PIs and their graduate students. This pays the university the student's tuition and a stipend and helps fund the cost of the professor. So as a researcher I can attract the most talented students and bring them in regardless of their ability to fund their own education. If grant funding is cut, my students are going to go elsewhere, and take their tuition with them, greatly shrinking the pool of talent available for me to bring to the university.
Most university ranking systems give a lot of weight to grant attainment. If you want to improve your national rankings, you go headhunt for grant hotshots. (UT Knoxville's astronomical rise in ranking is a prime example of this). Rankings in turn attract more and larger grants, which then buys state of the art equipment for the university, and brings in higher and higher levels of expertise in faculty and support staff. That attracts both talented undergraduate and graduate students, allowing the university to be more selective in admittance to the school, which raises the student profile -= another heavily weighted factor in university rankings. It also attracts potentially lucrative partnerships for the university with private firms who need that expertise and research capacity of the university.
It's really difficult to work your way up the reputational ladder as a university, but it ain't hard to work your way down, as numerous threads on this site have noted when national rankings come out every year. Low grant-attaining universities really can't support expensive-to-offer degrees in advanced engineering and science without grants. In my field, necessary pieces of equipment like mass spectrometers or fMRIs cost millions of dollars. Good luck finding a university that is willing to buy any of that. Students in the classes I teach, both undergraduate and graduate are making use and benefiting from that equipment and my expertise (largely funded by fed grants) and are at a competitive advantage in the job market over a student who didn't have those experiences.
I don't have a position on the merits of that particular program (although I generally feel like EBT cards and school lunch programs are some of the government spending with the smallest negative impacts), but I do like that states are finally turning down the pitch of "don't worry if it's wasteful, we'd primarily be screwing taxpayers in other states". That's a not insignificant contributor to us having unsustainable federal spending levels.
Who is making that pitch?
I agree that is an irresponsible way of looking at federal spending and that pitch should not be how programs are pitched.
But seriously, who is making that pitch?
If states were being pitched Medicare expansion with the argument that if it’s wasted, then at least other states are paying for it, that is a dumb perspective in my opinion and a bad argument to make.
I am not aware of any state being pitched Medicare expansion in that manner.
I am also not aware of any state being told a similar line as a pitch to accept USDA funding for feeding children that come from impoverished households.
What I am aware of is that my state now has exponentially less funding to provide food to kids in need because my Governor feels the funding would allow too many kids to be fat.
University research has been the cornerstone of American innovation, often via public/private partnerships that form when research finds value. Can you look back at all the failed things, maybe even stupid ideas, and see that money was "wasted" when it came to nothing? Sure. Would you be foolish to argue that research dollars should end? Sure.