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This morning, Catherine Toth blogged about Cost of your college degree on The Daily Dish blog in which she shared:

The other day one of my former students posed a question that’s been on my mind lately: how much is our college education really worth?

I started typing up a response, but as it got longer and longer, I decided I would copy and share it here. Here it is, with emphasis and some additional comments I added after I posted on Cat’s blog.

I think a Master’s degree is now what a Bachelor’s degree used to be 10-15 years ago. Meaning, many positions already expect everyone to have at least a Bachelor’s; possessing a Master’s helps you get promoted or perhaps get better pay. The degree requirement is often used as the “first cut” by interviewers or HR personnel. Why interview 100 people when you can just say “Bachelor’s degree required, Master’s preferred” in a job description and then only have 25 applicants to have to screen?

To students who question the value of an Associate’s degree, I think they should see it not as the end of their higher education career path, but the beginning of a continuum of education. This is one goal of the Hawaii P-20 Initiative. Even the military requires recruits to have a high school diploma. And that same military encourages officers to get advanced degrees. You can only go so high up in the ranks with a Bachelor’s degree. I know a Lieutenant Colonel who must get a Master’s degree to be promoted to a full bird Colonel.

Even those who enter so-called “blue collar” fields require formal education and training. For example, carpenters have to undergo an apprenticeship program. Professional drivers who require a CDL (Commercial Drivers License) also need formal education. So education is needed for so many jobs in our community, not just writers.

However, going back to what “maxcat” said in the comments, good, logical writing is a skill in any profession and any environment. Therefore, those with more education may be better-equipped in such environments to not only succeed, but also to excel. That’s not always true; I’ve worked with people with Master’s and Doctorate’s who were terrible writers. And I’ve also worked with people who only had a high school diploma who were excellent. So as with anything in life, your mileage may vary.

In the end, the point, and the question one should be asking is not “Should I get an education?” but rather “How much education should I get?” And once you get an education and a degree, that shouldn’t be the end of it. Professionals like doctors, lawyers, and accountants are constantly increasing their knowledge and skills by attending seminars and workshops. For a good writer, that can be doing a lot of reading, writing, or even blogging. And anyone that wants to improve their writing, but may not necessarily consider themselves good writers, can improve their skills by doing all of that. Anything that stimulates the mind is good for you!

Finally, going back to the cost factor of education, we always seem to wonder about the cost of educating ourselves. What about the cost of NOT educating ourselves? For anyone working an entry-level job for an entire lifetime, without promotions – not because of a lack of knowledge, commitment, loyalty, or hard work – but simply because of a lack of a degree, that has cost them far more than an education would have.

So make the leap today! Start by clicking here to explore any of the ten campuses of the University of Hawaii System. Remember, education is an investment; and by investing in your education, you are investing in yourself.

Now, if only we could all agree on this, then we could encourage all sides in Hawaii’s embarrassing Furlough Fridays debacle to come together and do what needs to be done to restore education in this state and assure everyone that we truly do value education and our future.

Mahalo!

***

P.S. – You can follow me on Twitter (@exbor) to get more regular updates.  Be warned, they are much more “regular” than my posts here. :)

P.P.S – Did you know capsun.org has it’s own Twitter account (@capsundotorg) that Tweets whenever I blog here or on my photo blog?

Please note:  The views expressed here are mine and mine alone.  While I am employed by and affiliated with organizations and individuals, permission has neither been asked nor granted to write on the topics discussed here.

You may have heard by now that across Hawaii, visitors and residents alike were awakened to the sound of blaring Civil Defense sirens on an otherwise peaceful Saturday morning. A tsunami was expected to hit after 11 am.

Luckily, it ended up being a non-event. We escaped almost any damage, except for some sewage treatment plant backups on Maui. And some very real losses for businesses that were closed.

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So, the most memorable part of this non-event may be “the idiot” – you know, the guy that was seen wading in the water shortly before the tsunami was expected to hit. Some of my friends also called him a babooze. But perhaps the best description for this guy came from Howard Dicus (@AskHoward) on Saturday who wrote “Apotheosis of the dumbass” just for this guy.

In that post, Howard observed, “He might not have been a waterman, and he certainly was fecalcephalic, but he captured the attention of Hawaii.” But I was stumped. What is it to be fecalcephalic? Being a lazy, tech-savvy person who is part of the generation that turned Google from a noun to a verb, I naturally Googled the term. No luck. Even the great Google couldn’t help me. It returned Howard’s post as the top result. But I read the other search results and many others broke the term fecalcephalic into two words (fecal cephalic) or a hyphenated word (fecal-cephalic).

That made things easy. I just looked up definitions and found this:

Main Entry: fe·cal
Function: adjective
:
of, relating to, or constituting feces

Main Entry: ce·phal·ic
Function: adjective
1 : of or relating to the head

Mash those two together to get the answer. One could argue that Howard just meant dumbass. But I wonder if he meant something more along the lines of…sh*t head?

By the way, there’s even a Facebook fan page of the fecalcephalic idiot, called “The idiot who was swimming in Waikiki during the tsunami warning” Check it out, join the fun, and read some of the feedback. It’s entertaining.

Mahalo!

***

P.S. – You can follow me on Twitter (@exbor) to get more regular updates.  Be warned, they are much more “regular” than my posts here. :)

P.P.S – Did you know capsun.org has it’s own Twitter account (@capsundotorg) that Tweets whenever I blog here or on my photo blog?

Please note:  The views expressed here are mine and mine alone.  While I am employed by and affiliated with organizations and individuals, permission has neither been asked nor granted to write on the topics discussed here.

Media credit: supremecourtus.gov

Media credit: supremecourtus.gov

Yesterday at lunch, in referencing some events of 2000, I noted that Rice v. Cayetano was decided about 10 years ago. Being the nerd that I am, I had to look it up. I knew that case was decided 10 years ago, but I didn’t know that yesterday was 10 years to the day that the U.S. Supreme Court decided that case. That’s right, on February 23, 2000, SCOTUS (that’s the acronym many use for the Supreme Court of the United States) issued their opinion in the case.

As a native Hawaiian, I remember following this case as it made its way through the legal system. Many Hawaiians, including one of my grandmothers, who don’t normally follow legal developments, watched this one.

Why? Because this case challenged the constitutionality of elections for OHA (Office of Hawaiian Affairs) trustees. Prior to the Court’s ruling, OHA trustees were elected by Native Hawaiians registered to vote in Hawaii and who additionally registered to vote in OHA elections. When the Court ruled this was unconstitutional, the State then opened OHA elections to all registered voters. Today, OHA trustees, although they work toward the betterment of the conditions of Native Hawaiians, their beneficiaries, they are elected statewide, where any registered voter may vote in their election.

A great resource for anyone who wants to know about cases handled by SCOTUS is oyez.org. There, you can read analysis, listen to oral arguments before the court, read a transcript of such arguments, listen to the opinion given by the Court, and read a transcript of the opinion. It’s a great resource that tries to make it easier for citizens to understand SCOTUS and the cases they hear.

Oyez says they are:

a multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work. It aims to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. The Project also provides authoritative information on all justices and offers a virtual reality ‘tour’ of portions of the Supreme Court building, including the chambers of some of the justices.

And here’s what they had to say about Rice v. Cayetano:

Facts of the Case:

The Hawaiian Constitution limits the right to vote for the nine trustees of the state agency known as the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA). The agency administers programs designed for the benefit of two subclasses of Hawaiian citizenry, “Hawaiians,” defined as descendants of not less than one-half part of the races inhabiting the Islands before 1778, and “native Hawaiians,” defined as descendants of the peoples inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. Only “Hawaiians” may vote in the statewide election for the trusties. Harold Rice, born in Hawaii and a Hawaiian citizen, does not have the requisite ancestry to be a “Hawaiian” under state law. However, Rice applied to vote in OHA trustee elections. After Rice’s application was denied, he sued Hawaiian Governor Benjamin J. Cayetano, claiming that the voting exclusion was invalid under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Federal District Court granted the state summary judgment. The court examined the voting qualifications with the latitude applied to legislation passed pursuant to Congress’ power over Indian affairs, and found that the electoral scheme was rationally related to the state’s responsibility to utilize a part of the proceeds from certain public lands for the native Hawaiians’ benefit. In affirming, the Court of Appeals found that Hawaii “may rationally conclude that Hawaiians, being the group to whom trust obligations run and to whom OHA trustees owe a duty of loyalty, should be the group to decide who the trustees ought to be.”

Question:

Does the Hawaiian Constitutional provision, which limits the right to for the trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to qualified “Hawaiians,” violate the Fifteenth Amendment by creating a race-based voting qualification?

Conclusion:

Yes. In a 7-2 opinion delivered by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the Court held that “Hawaii’s denial of Rice’s right to vote in OHA trustee elections violates the Fifteenth Amendment,” in creating a race-based voting qualification. “A state may not deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, and this law does so,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court. The court rejected the state’s argument that the voting limitation was one based on ancestry, not race. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for himself and Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the majority’s decision “rests largely on the repetition of glittering generalities that have little, if any, application to the compelling history of the state of Hawaii.”

One nice feature of Oyez is their use of photos of the justices to denote the votes, so you can visually see how they voted.

One final interesting point. Ten years to the day after Rice v. Cayetano was decided by SCOTUS, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR2314, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act or the Akaka Bill. It’s passage was one of the last tasks Congressman Neil Abercrombie completed before coming home to campaign full-time for governor.

While the Akaka Bill is not quite the same as the issue of Rice, it is a political means to correct some of the wrongs done to Native Hawaiians that OHA was originally created to address.

Mahalo!

***

P.S. – You can follow me on Twitter (@exbor) to get more regular updates.  Be warned, they are much more “regular” than my posts here. :)

P.P.S – Did you know capsun.org has it’s own Twitter account (@capsundotorg) that Tweets whenever I blog here or on my photo blog?

Please note:  The views expressed here are mine and mine alone.  While I am employed by and affiliated with organizations and individuals, permission has neither been asked nor granted to write on the topics discussed here.

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