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The Daily Illini’s editorial board doesn’t think much of the governor’s plan to toughen high school graduation requirements.
If anything, this bill is three decades late. Thirty years ago, the cost of higher education was not as prohibitive as it is now. Thirty years ago, these requirements would have been enough to just graduate high school, not go to college and yet still earn a substantial salary.All this bill does now is make Blagojevich look good without accomplishing the goal of getting more students into college. A huge amount of money gets pumped into the secondary education system and yet does not achieve what is needed - giving kids the money to go to college. Many careers today require not just a bachelor’s degree, but a professional degree, as well. Repeated studies have shown that a high school graduate will earn substantially less than those with a college degree.
Archpundit has more, but focuses on the funding split.
posted by Rich Miller
Thursday, Apr 21, 05 @ 7:10 am
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“A huge amount of money gets pumped into the secondary education system and yet does not achieve what is needed - giving kids the money to go to college”
Would you expect the editorial board of a newspaper that is FUNDED BY A UNIVERISTY to come to any other conclusion?
Sheesh…..the crap that passes for ‘journalism’ these days….
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Apr 21, 05 @ 12:15 pm
The Daily Illini, or “DI,” is not funded by the University of Illinois. They are run as a non-profit corporation of the Illini Media Company. I request that comment submitters please get the facts straight before they post an erroneous comment.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Apr 21, 05 @ 12:40 pm
The Daily Illini, or “DI,” is not funded by the University of Illinois. They are run as a non-profit corporation of the Illini Media Company. I request that comment submitters please get the facts straight before they post an erroneous comment.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Apr 21, 05 @ 12:41 pm
What bothered me even more than the error was the intense cynicism that the governor’s supporter used in that post to denigrate the other side. Almost sickening.
Comment by Rich Miller Thursday, Apr 21, 05 @ 12:48 pm
Question: Who is the DI’s biggest source of ad revenue? (hint: it is the university)
Also, any money used from SORF must go to the DI:
From the SORF guidelines:
d) Without the unanimous consent of the SORF Board, newspaper ads may be placed only in the Daily Illini (DI). SORF will not reimburse ads placed in any newspaper other than the Daily Illini.
source: http://www.union.uiuc.edu/sorf/guidelines.html
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Apr 21, 05 @ 2:33 pm
Anonymous:
I agree with you that SORF (a student fee used to support student organizations) only allows ads to be placed in the DI. This is a policy of the students (as students are elected to serve on SORF and administer the distribution of the SORF fee) as to maximize the value of SORF’s money. It just does not make sense to run ads in another paper, such as the News-Gazette, given that most students primarily read the DI on any given day.
In response to University of Illinois ads, - paid for by taxpayer dollars and tuition - I suspect that the various search committees for various open University positions (UI President, Chancellor, Professors, heck - even Janitors) spend far more money in state and nationwide newspapers than the U. of I. spends in ads for the DI.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Apr 21, 05 @ 4:23 pm
I don’t know all the specifics of the DI relationship, but I do know that, in general, campus newspapers, while generating most of their revenue through advertising, are subtly controlled by their affiliated school. They use institutional facilities and have institutional advisors who “steer” stories and editorials in the desired direction.
Getting back to the article itself, the Emancipation Proclamation was at least a couple hundred years late. Does that mean it was junk?
Comment by Anonymous Friday, Apr 22, 05 @ 8:43 am
While the legislation (SB575) is well intentioned, the sequence is mixed up. The writing requirement should come first because it’s a low-cost, simple curriculum change and allows schools time to plan for the other higher graduation standards.
Next up should be science because Illinois is the only state that requires one year to graduate and aging boomers are going to need even more skilled medical staff beyond our current shortage. For poor or rural schools, the Illinois Virtual High School (www.ivhs.org) allows resource pooling to give self-motivated students access to advanced study with highly qualified teachers. Also to help teacher shortages, those with any engineering or science degree should be eligible to teach.
Higher math graduation requirements can wait because abstract algebra isn’t as useful (or interesting) as basic statistics or logic. Also, programming jobs are easily moved overseas, unlike the scientific R&D that creates new products, jobs, and exports.
Another year of English is nice, but can wait till we can afford it.
We need to keep our priorities straight!
Comment by Anonymous Saturday, Apr 23, 05 @ 3:38 pm
So you all can sleep at night…
the daily illini editorial content is not shaped by anyone but the students themselves, sometimes to the papers’ detriment.
the administration has no relationship with the paper other than to pitch story ideas, buy some ads, and piss and moan a lot after major screwups because most people don’t realize the paper is independent from the university so when parents and alumni don’t like something that gets printed they don’t complain to the paper, they complain to the university.
because the daily illini is not affiliated with the journalism department, does not use u of i facilities as it has its own building, does not use u of i equipment at all, does not have any u of i journalism faculty on staff (although there are some faculty serving as non-paid board members on the entire company’s board of directors which oversees the di and also the yearbook and radio operations) the only leverage the admins have is halting the distribution of the free paper in campus buildings. I guess they can also threaten that they’ll start their own competing paper. unfortunately for them the daily illini has like a 125 year head start in branding and the university doesn’t have much money for new programs anyway, so for now that isn’t happening.
As for this particular situation:
First, it’s very bizarre that someone would thinking that this particular editorial is shilling for the university administration because the U of I president has come out in FAVOR of blago’s education reform, but this editorial is AGAINST it.
Second, what was that whole business about a SORF giving money to the DI conspiracy? Are our media bias antennas supposed to be buzzing because money is going from SORF — an optional fee paid by UI students, who coincidentally are the the DI’s primary readership — into the DI’s operations? Wow imagine if people paid money for the Sun-Times, I bet the Sun-Times would start tailoring their stories to those readers…
p.s. I’m not convinced that the university is the number one ad buyer, but I haven’t seen a copy of the paper in a long time. In my day there were just as many bar ads as there were university ads, if not more.
Comment by former illini media co. employee Monday, Apr 25, 05 @ 10:06 pm