The real answer to me is that a lot of people hear "free college for everyone", and decide that this doesn't make sense because there's no way they themselves could have succeeded in college. Extrapolate from that, and most people can't attend college. So if it's a program that only benefits the few, it's evil socialism, and it will just make the government bigger while me and my children get nothing out of it.

Now pretty much every step of that logic is faulty, but I believe it's what people mean when they say "we can't afford to send everyone to college for free". Where the reality is, we really can't afford not to send everyone for free in an information economy.

Having to paying for higher education wouldn't even be such a problem if it still cost what it did when my parents attended.

Although, maybe this whole thing is that the military budget has gone up by 80% since my grandparents attended college and education spending by the federal government has gone down 10 times. Also with the fact that there are five times as many Americans attending college than when my grandparents did, I definitely agree it's time we sat down as a nation and discussed whether we as a nation should pay for our children to be educated to the level necessary to excel in the modern economy.

I don't think the tax hike would even be that extreme. The reason tuition is what it costs right now is that it pays for the people who are getting free rides for various reasons. We got a letter from University of California once that among other things stated that only about 40% of tuition for someone who is paying to attend actually goes to education that student, the other 60% goes to paying for people the UC gave grants and scholarships to. [Warning - Napkin Math] If it actually cost something like $10k per year per american college student, of which there are 20.5 million students attending both public and private universities, we would need something like an addition $210 billion in tax revenue per year, or an addition 6.4% revenue. So your 25% federal tax bracket would turn into 26.6%. That's not all that much when you think about it. Or, the government renegotiates their military contracts to stop being price-gouged in order lower the defense budget. Then use the savings to help fund education...

This fueled significant administrative bloat (compare the administrative org chart of your school to the one your parents or grandparents attended) and massive spending on new facilities, which locked in the need for the higher tuition rates.

It's hardly a perfect system but the basic idea is not unreasonable. And remember, if one pumps money into the system from the government side (which, IMHO, should happen) the counterintuitive result is that rich kids are likely to be the first ones to benefit.

And that's a pretty optimistic observable.

To put another way, let's take a doctor. He can make a huge salary, but also has a huge student loan debt to pay off (potentially high 6 figure). You can't just slash their salaries and stick them with that education bill. And you can't slash education prices as long as they're more or less private. These two go hand in hand and are going to continue to plague us in costs.

You could say that a real character or charismatic leader may emerge from outside the political system and slowly convince people to change things, but the US just got the former and I don't know that it's working very well.

Brings to mind this recent story about Dwayne Johnson as a potential candidate: http://www.gq.com/story/dwayne-johnson-for-president-cover

In SOME countries in europe, higher education is free. I've met plenty of Brits with student loans. They're still in Europe (and the eu for now)

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-do-european-countries-aff...

"For all countries, with the exception of Finland, the US has a much higher percentage of students who have enrolled in post-high school education."

After typically attending primary school for four years [1] (age 6-10 or 7-11), there are three basic types of secondary schools:

- The Hauptschule (general school) is five years long (for a total of nine years). This level of education traditionally [1] prepares for vocational training in the crafts, e.g. in construction or as a barber and so on. As far as I know, there is no way to get to university from here.

- The Realschule (real school) is six years long (for a total of ten years). This level of education is traditionally [1] required for office staff. From this point, you can get to the Allgemeine Hochschulreife by completing vocational education in a profession of your choosing (typically 3 years), then attending school again for 1-2 years, which gives you the Fachhochschulreife (entrance qualification for universities of applied sciences).

This is how my brothers got their degrees: They both went through Realschule, completed vocational training (one as a road builder, the other as a gauger), then got the Fachhochschulreife, applied to a university of applied sciences, and completed a 4-year curriculum to become certified civil engineers.

- The Gymnasium is eight or nine years long (for a total of 12-13 years). Successful completion gives you the Allgemeine Hochschulreife (general university entrance qualification) which allows you to enroll at any university in Germany.

This is how I did it. The only barrier that might exist is a Numerus Clausus: If courses are in higher demand than what universities can muster, they can restrict entry to students with a grade higher than a certain threshold. (The grade is the one on the entrance qualification.)

In my case (I studied physics and computer science in Dresden), this didn't apply: All I had to do was to fill out a form with my name, address and desired major and hand it in before a certain deadline. Also, there is a small tuition fee of around 250 euros per semester. Of this, about 180 euros pay for my subsidized public transit ticket. About 60 euros go to the Studentenwerk (student services), which operates the university's canteens and offers counseling. The remaining change goes to the student's council.

[1] The fine print for all of these descriptions: The education system is in constant upheaval in Germany. Every politician or focus group has their own opinion on how the system should be. Therefore, there's not just 3 forms of secondary school. More like 30 or 40 (over all 16 member states of the Federal Republic of Germany). Secondly, there's a similar trend in Germany than in the US or elsewhere to put less and less value on the shorter tiers of secondary school. More and more roles that used to be Realschule plus vocational education now require a degree. And more and more vocational trainings that used to require Hauptschule now require Realschule. Whereas, a few decades ago, maybe 10% of pupils attended Gymnasium (and went on to university), nowadays it's more like 50-60%.

More degrees inflating the job market, isn't going to increase productivity or magically make more jobs. And since there's already an oversupply of candidates, even more candidates won't make it much better.

If you want to see what more degrees does to a country, take a quick look at China. There, the glut of degree holding candidates is so great, that migratory workers get paid more than college graduates!

Second, you can also study CS for free in the United States or at a heavy scholarship. Large state schools subsidize a lot of engineers in their educational pursuit so long as you achieve good grades, or score well on entrance exams.

The primary issue we're facing is that we, as a society, decided that in order to obtain an ok-paying job you must attend a university, even when the skills for the job have nothing to do with your education aside from genera knowledge increase. Because of this fact, and the large number of students seeking entrance to university (to get a job) we find that we have far too many students who want to attend college who should not be attending college and they get funneled into degree programs that, while valuable, are not valuable for work. The students that have exceptional need, or exceptional skill, are almost always given a full tuition scholarship so long as they make good grades.

Furthermore, by any measure that matters, the universities in the United States are the best in the world, bar none. So the competition to attend, places further pressure on those seeking degrees that do not immediately translate into a high paying job. We've made a mistake, as a society, by emphasizing "go to college" over "go to trade school".

The rest of your tax argument is based on not much. Paying high taxes is not indicative of anything. In many cases (in my opinion) government does a great job with services. Areas like healthcare are a prime candidate for government take over, but university education is a far more complicated situation. As somebody else mentioned, most student loans are for under $20,000. And a $6,000 deductible? Idk. I have a great healthcare plan where I don't pay much out of pocket.

There is a good podcast about the cost of healthcare but I can't recal the name. But basically, the US spends far more than any country whether you consider it as a nationalized system or a free market system. It's far more complicated than a simple "pay $5,000 more in taxes" argument.

Maybe a very tiny minority of the top schools, but in my experience as a CS graduate from another country, I have not really found the skills taught to graduates outside of the small circle of Ivy Leagues and top-tier unis to be anything particuarly extraordinary.

Grade inflation and the American bias of universities as research institutions where quality is measured by the number of papers and impact factor does not favor other educational systems where most of the research is done in specialized institutions where undergrads are not being taught.

When you get to make up the rankings, it's generally no surprise that the rankings favor you.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

For example, European GDP per capita is typically ~75% that of the US GDP per capita. Have you ever considered the possibility that the tax regimes of European economies might be a contributing factor to this?

Or have you considered what differences in attendance look like? For example the US has significantly higher than OECD average for tertiary education achievement (https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-educat...) Now, imagine what our achievement would look like without any cost for the education. Further, consider this doesn't take into account graduation rates. It may very well be the case that US graduation rates are lower than European rates implying even larger costs in the US.

What about the effects of such policies on quality? The US is typically seen as having excellent higher education quality. Would a regime under which higher education becomes free require wage freezes for professors? Increases in class size? Decreases in extra-curricular support?

What about the many Euro countries that offer free higher education but to a much smaller sample of the population by making it extremely restrictive (i.e. Germany)?

What's mind boggling is that anyone could ignore the massive tradeoffs of such a widespread and costly project as free higher education in the US and simply refer to it as "magic".

People wonder why they have to pay so much for tuition and extra fees. Somewhere along the line sports became more important than academia and drove the cost of a 4 year degree from a 15k to 100k.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-philip-l-yeagle/may-you-get...

That would be the other side of the coin: if you do poorly on the exam or have poor grades, your choices are limited, no?

The upside of the American system is that anyone can get higher education. The downside is that many of the schools are tuition mills.

For almost all professions, you can work in that profession after getting a degree from any accredited institution (or often even an unaccredited institution.) Almost all schools are accredited. Virtually every (probably every) public university is accredited and they usually have very low admittance requirements, low costs, and generous scholarships. In many (most?) states, high test scores or a good high school GPA get you a free ride to an in-state public university.

Community college is a good way to get the first two years of a four year degree, or for an Associate's degree that, depending on your field, may be sufficient. They generally also have vocational programs.

You could most certainly become an aviation engineer, architect, etc. by going to almost any school.

The debt story is vastly overblown in the US - it's a serious problem, but mostly among middle-class to upper-middle class families who allow their kids to select the most prestigious and expensive schools, regardless of their academic qualifications, chosen major, or ability to pay. Even in 2017 you can easily get a four-year degree from a good accredited institution and graduate debt free, even if you're not an academic superstar.

Nothing is free. Someone is paying for it.

You are basically advocating the most regressive tax in history. That money would be vastly better served by sending it to inner city elementary schools than dangling in front of a huge group of people who will never be able to use it.

The fallacy you're falling for is that you think that a person's tax bill is going to change depending on what the government spends money on. If the government doesn't spend on education then a hairdresser doesn't get to pay less tax; that money is saved to used to cut taxes for the wealthy, or to give giant corporations a break, or to buy even fancier bombs from billion dollar arms companies. Ordinary people aren't affected.

Given the choice between giving corporations an amnesty on reshoring the billions in cash they have in offshore accounts or paying for kids to go to college for free, I think the better option is education.

No, I never said that, I said there are better ways to spend the money. In 2015 in East Palo Alto, they had to close an elementary school for two weeks because they had no heat. How much do you think those kids benefit from a promise of free college versus a safe, clean, heated, well staffed elementary school?

Given the choice between giving corporations an amnesty on reshoring the billions in cash they have in offshore accounts or paying for kids to go to college for free, I think the better option is education.

Talk about fallacies, there is a false dilemma wrapped in a straw man for you, but let's go with it. No one is offering that choice, but if they were, you should probably be for it because the reshored money could be used for education, though hopefully spent wisely, not on free college. With an amnesty, at least the govt. gets some money to spend. It doesn't help pay for free college to do nothing.

I don't understand that part. In the EU poorer kids have better chances to change their situation due to easier access to higher education.

The root of the social equality issues in the US are vastly far removed from "free college". It's the exact opposite - we need fewer marginal colleges, fewer for profit colleges, fewer marginal graduates, fewer drop outs, and more job training.

If the US could take one lesson from European education, it would be a good system of tracking students into job training in high school.