It's also the case that the pipeline to college attendance is constructed to reward children brought up under middle class circumstances. Unless you think it's the case that food and shelter insecurity, the requirement to care for and sometimes transport younger siblings, and sometimes total lack of supervision doesn't contribute to poorer school performance.

In that sense, proposals for free college tuition aren't that much different than the (totally, unbelievably, egregiously regressive) tax favoritism we accord home ownership through the mortgage income deduction.

How about we fix childcare and K-12 first?

Well, you already know that the answer to that. Desirable employers don't screen job applicants based on which childcare facility and high school they attended. It's always college that's the focal point. Seems inevitable that the reactionary conversation then gravitates towards fixing college access rather than K-12 quality. (Therefore, it doesn't matter if K-12 is actually the more important thing to fix.) As an example, James Clark of Netscape dropped out of high school[1] but his future employers didn't care because he had a college degree. The college degree overshadows the stigma of being a high school dropout.

If McKinsey Consulting, Goldman Sachs, Google Inc, etc filtered out candidates based on what kind of public libraries the candidate had access to while he grew up, I suppose we'd be having political conversations about "building better public libraries!" so children can compete for jobs.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark#Early_life_and_...

I'm not arguing against college (I think there are arguments against college as an opportunity equalizer, but I'm not making them). I'm arguing against free tuition for everyone as a vector for getting more low-income people into college.

If you want more low-income people to attend college, fix childcare first, so high-school age students aren't sacrificing class rank to take care of younger siblings and graduating high school into circumstances that demand they immediately find a wage.

Or, if you're dead set on applying pressure at college itself: means-test the benefit, so at least you're not giving billions of dollars away to families making six-figure incomes while families making less than $40,000 are sending their 17-18 year olds to 5 years of sporadic dead-end service industry employment. Because: "college is too expensive" is not the only reason that happens. There are plenty of extremely inexpensive community colleges that are vast improvements over 9 months working at the Sprint Cell Phone Store. But that's where low-income teenagers often end up.

Free childcare for working families (particularly single mothers) would do so much to lift kids out of poverty.

Free college tuition is a start, but you're right that even more investment is needed. College students should be paid by the state to invest in their education and enjoy their carefree student days.

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Mortgage interest deductions are obviously and inexcusably evil policy, of course. They make a bad example for comparison, like holding up someone's politics to Naziism.

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Also, we can't just fix K-12 or child care first and leave everything else aside. Those are complicated issues that will be controversial forever. We do have to improve other things in the meanwhile.

This is a solved problem.

Is education primarily an economic, or social good?

If you meant that Germany high school ends by default at age 16 for all students, then yes, the USA is radically different in that respect. Also, Germany's summer vacation is 6 weeks instead of USA's 12 weeks. Since Germany ranks ahead of USA in primary education standings, maybe they have the better system.

[1]http://statelaws.findlaw.com/florida-law/florida-compulsory-...

In the UK we have preschools for kids around 2 to 3 years old. They're mostly focused around play rather than formal lessons, but I think it helps kids to get used to a school-type environment and start to socialise with kids their age.

Restricting education to what's needed for employment creates a class division between high and low education groups. Social decisions become dominated by expert language that's incomprehensible to the majority, creating conditions for a populist backlash.

Perhaps we should find a better way to distribute education; not just among social economic class, but by span and duration ("doses"). Otherwise we might see unnecessary educational inflation (which I think may be the case now), rather than an educational deflation.

It's an essential part of living a life of leisure and privilege in modern industrial society. And it should be free for everyone that wants it.

That being said, I'm for the government funding the education of its citizens; but those who recieve government money should have to take certain subjects and pass those classes with an acceptable grade (B's or above).

I think Social Security retirement pensions are an essential part of a quality modern lifestyle and an important job of government. So is a leisurely four year college experience for anyone that can invest enough intellectual effort to read a few books and keep passing most of his classes.

One possible relevant benefit of free college, though, is that it removes a lot of the bad incentives in the university-student relationship. If students aren't in the paying customer role, and universities aren't so strongly incentivized to sell as many degrees as possible, it's a lot easier to enforce strict academic standards. So it could actually improve the degree inflation situation.

Let's not paint with too-broad a brush here. If the "exam bank" of possible test questions is sufficiently comprehensive and rigorous, then teaching to the test is not a joke at all, but an effective pedagogical method. If students can write acceptable answers to a random selection of questions from such an exam bank, it follows that those students do indeed know what you want them to know, at least to the extent that testing can ascertain whether or not that's the case.

But all in all, I think it worked out pretty well in the past - no tuition, free access and lectures are public anyway. So everyone gets a chance to try it, most drop out in the first year, probably changing field of study once or twice. But as we don't have that minor/major stuff but the curricula are extremely specialized, this is probably not bad for widening the horizon. Still better than arbitrary tests or the weird numerus clausus in Germany.

I don't think that an university degree should be mandatory for everyone (we have a lot of specialized schools as an alternative), but it's good if the option to try it is there.

I hope my children's children's children get to live in a future where a Ph.D. (or whatever) is the default. It probably won't happen, but I wish I lived in that world. Is this an upsetting ideal to you? (Serious question, I am honestly very confused by your statement).

Edit: I can understand being upset by the idea of gating jobs by a four-year degree, but I think I disagree about the percentage of (particularly future-safe) jobs for which a four year degree are necessary: medicine, law, engineering, teaching, even public administration. Your average paralegal, nurse, junior high math teacher, and public health official should all probably have degrees. And sure, there are proxies for a degree that aren't a degree, but I think I'd prefer to live in a world where a degree was attainable for those with ability, drive, and cooperative circumstances.

An administrative assistant may not get anything at college directly applicable to their job, but they might get something that will help them make more informed decisions when things like vaccinations and climate change become issues in a political campaign or show up on ballot initiatives.

I see 'free college' and 'college by default' as two separate things, not as one. Just because someone can go to college (for free) doesn't mean someone should. In a 'free college' world, we would still need plenty of not-necessarily-college firefighters, plumbers, mechanics, electricians (and I'm sure there are many other routes that aren't best served by college), but people might not feel the same pressure to load up on debt at such a volatile point in their lives.