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Theme: DOD: What Are We Getting for Our Money?

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Interview: Solution Series: Building Wealth with Catherine Austin Fitts and Ricardo Oskam

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138 Comments

  1. In addition, I had spoken with students who had gone there a few years before, then came back to get a different 2 year degree. They told me that it used to be that it was hard to find a parking place in our 1000 spot lots. I was shocked. Students were parking in adjacent grassy fields and roadsides. 5 years later in 2015 / 16 / 17, the parking lots were less than half full, maybe 40% full. Reason? These older students, now in their late-20’s to early-40’s, said it was due to the tuition increases the state allowed the community colleges to make each year. Instead of volume, they went with an elitist view and slowly but surely priced themselves out of the market. On my last day, several of the students lamented to me about my leaving and several of their favorite teachers leaving, “Why do they always get rid of the good ones?”.

  2. 1/4 of the way in, you discuss colleges, their tuition hikes and spending, and not aspiring to make their students outstanding for the global market. I graduated from North Carolina State in Raleigh (where John now lives) in the late ’70’s. I had a scholarship for chemical engineering. I worked in industry for 35 years, then got tired of the rat race, so began teaching Process Technology at my local community college / VoTech. Half my salary but twice as much fun. This program teaches students how to operate industrial plants, from pumps and motors and chemical reactions to electricity generation to discharge water purification to industrial automation. I wanted my students to succeed as I had done, yet I kept running into roadblocks and barriers that prevented me from teaching the full gamut of what was needed. Then the state ran out of money and let me, my dean, and my vice chancellor and 27 other instructors and staff go at the end of the school year. Then during the summer they found $4.3 million to “complete” the building I was in (finish the other half that was in the original plans 10 years before) which included a new auditorium, some classrooms, and 2 industrial labs which were filled with equipment from another campus they decided to close that had older buildings, but still in good condition.

  5. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services recently proposed to amend IDEA Part B regulations “to remove the requirement for public agencies to obtain parental consent prior to accessing for the first time a child’s public benefits or insurance to provide or pay for required IDEA Part B services.” Mary Byrne, Ed D, alerted me to this and explained this means the agencies can treat the child without parental consent. It’s deviously written – “accessing the child’s benefits” means treating.

    Mary is a tireless advocate in the area of education. She’s fought Common Core and recently founded the Educated Citizens Project. ecp.org (That’s just the tip of the iceberg of all her efforts. If you see articles written by Mary, they’re well worth reading as she knows her topic and does the research.)

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