Melbourne College May Give iPad To Every Student 350
daria42 writes "It looks like Apple's hyped iPad tablet may find a functional use beyond the early technology adopter set. In Australia, a Melbourne University college recently completed a trial where a limited number of students were given an iPad to aid in their studies. The outcome? The college has now recommended every student be given one of the Apple devices, following in the footsteps of the University of Adelaide, which is handing out iPads to every first year science student. Sure beats lugging around the old textbooks!"
Re:"Giving"? (Score:2, Informative)
Don't you mean "Adding to tuition costs"?
No. Almost all universities in Australia are public and the cost of tuition is heavily government subsidised and is uniform between universities all over the country.
That's right Americans, we're clearly a bunch of education and sun loving socialists!
Re:"Giving"? (Score:5, Informative)
Trinity College is a private institution and receives no government funding. But in the case of the trial, the students were indeed given the iPads, but they returned them at the end of the program, and they paid nothing extra in their fees.
(I may work for Trinity College, but I don't speak for them.)
Re:"Giving"? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes I feel that the meaning of the article is getting 'lost in translation' by many Americans reading it. Americans use the word 'college' to refer to the ~entire university~. They say 'I went to college' to indicate that they went to university. This has resulted in many confusing conversations about tertiary education between Americans and other English speakers in my experience (which is extensive as I'm a dual US-Australian citizen and spend a lot of time in both countries).
In Australia (and the UK and other Commonwealth countries), a 'college' is a ~residential~ institution, typically situated on campus (but perhaps also elsewhere in the city). That is, where the students go to eat and sleep at the end of the day. Many also offer out of hours tuition services and other extra-curricular stuff. They may be indirectly owned by the university itself, or they may be completely private institutions. But they are not 'the university' (i.e. the entity you pay your tuition to). They are separate entities who you pay for food and lodging.
American students often live in 'the dorms', which fills the same need as colleges but in reality is quite a different experience. As mentioned, colleges are often private, completely separate institutions from the universities themselves. They have various levels of prestige in their own right (Trinity, mentioned in TFA, is a pretty high end one and doesn't come cheap). They aren't merely a place to sleep but are a big part of your university life and experience.
Re:"Giving"? (Score:4, Informative)
A further complication is that the trial involved Foundation Studies students, who are international students who do a ~10 month bridging program taught by Trinity College before attending university, and who don't actually live at Trinity.
Re:"Giving"? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, TFA badly summarises the original report, which was written for an internal audience, and therefore made assumptions about the understanding of Trinity's course structures.
The trial was for a small group of international students, the Foundation Studies "August Entry 2010" intake. Staff involved in Foundation Studies (and not staff in the rest of the College) will get iPads in 2011. And starting with the "August Entry 2011" intake, all Foundation Studies students (who are international students) will get iPads. There's no government funding involved in any of this.
There's been no discussion of the mandated use of iPads in the Residential College or Theological School, which are the other two main educational units of Trinity College.
Re:LOL, "savings and investment" (Score:5, Informative)
And what do you think happens when people save money (they don't put it under their mattresses)? It goes in the bank.
No it doesn't. Not "rich money" anyway (which is the kind that "gets saved" in this case).
Poor(er) people keep their savings in the bank. Rich "invest" in tax shelters.
And since "money has no nationality" it often goes outside the economy that you were trying to boost.
Poor money can't afford to get itself spent on real-estate projects in Dubai.
How anyone can look at the Reagan era and say "trickle down" didn't work is laughable. 19 straight years of Dow growth (1981-1999), after 20 flat years.
Quite easily actually... [findarticles.com]
The tax cuts of 1981 and 1986 were followed by significant, though not huge, upswings in the economy.
However, as William Gale of the Brookings Institution has pointed out, "The simple fact is that business and household saving did not rise in the 1980s...." There was increased investment due to "an inflow of foreign capital. But by the mid- 1980s, net investment had receded to its earlier levels."
Economic growth in the 1980s was real, but it came from the normal upswing of the business cycle, made more forceful by huge deficits that bolstered economy-wide purchasing power (or "aggregate demand"). Moreover, the growth of those years provided a lot of feed for the horses but didn't do much for the sparrows. After-tax corporate profits rose by close to 60% between 1980 and 1989, while average hourly earnings in 1989 were slightly below their 1980 level and 10% below their 1973 peak. (All this is after adjustment for inflation.)
Throughout the decade, income distribution worsened: In 1980, the top 5% of households were obtaining 3.7 times as much total income as the bottom 20%, but by 1989 this elite group was receiving five times as much as that (much larger) bottom group. So much for any "trickle down" from the tax changes of the 1980s.
Also, considering that people often conflate it with supply-side economics - it should be noted that SSE also mostly fails to fulfill its promises.
Cause, when you take this [wikipedia.org] in account, and have an open mind to this [wikipedia.org], you come to this conclusion. [wikipedia.org]
In 2003, the Wall Street Journal declared the debate over supply-side economics to have ended "with a whimper" after extensive modeling performed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) failed to support the most extreme claims of supply-side policies.[2] ...
This research undermines the claim that tax cuts can completely compensate for the initial loss of revenue due to the cut, but does acknowledge that resulting growth from the tax cut does replace some of the lost revenue, and the CBO has come under fire for using low estimates.