I'm not against a liberal education for the betterment of the person, but it's not a sound investment.
We should not aim to make college free by means of government sponsorship, but rather education free or inexpensive by means of lowering the actual costs. As someone else said in this thread, certain kinds of knowledge are rather cheap to be had. Yet even so, degrees are pursued blindly by students, and hired blindly by employers.
Again, there's plenty of benefit to schooling. I liked taking classes with peers, including the non-major classes (for the most part). But throwing more money at the problem is the problem.
The private ivy-league and liberal arts colleges are the ones with the highest price tag, and also seem to be the ones most likely to give someone a "leg up" into an upper class life, mostly through the contacts gained while attending. They're also losing quite a bit of their value, especially the smaller liberal arts colleges.
I think that you're vastly underestimating how much money is needed to provide quality higher education. Trust me, the last thing we need is a race to the bottom when it comes to higher education.
Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US. Now you may argue that students shouldn't be so superficial, but they are, so universities have to deal with that when competing at the national stage.
As for administration, you probably have no idea how complicated it is to keep a university running. Don't like it? Good luck getting faculty to do the daily grunt work. Their plates are overflowing already just trying to get tenure and keep their jobs.
The higher education system definitely has room to improve, but to claim that it's as simple as "cheap facilities and no marketing" is a vast oversimplification in my opinion.
Yes but that isn't actually making education better overall, it just means you're taking in better students. It's a zero sum game. Every college could deck out their dorms like the 4 Seasons Hotels, but it's not actually improving the quality of the education provided. It's still the same set of students, rotated around a bit more between which ones ended up in which schools.
That's the key part - is separating out what costs actually provide a better overall education vs. which costs just are "marketing in disguise" to take the top students from School A and convince them to go to School B.
Look, public universities in other advanced economies like Japan, Germany, and France probably spend just as much as a typical US state university, yet tuition is basically free. We can argue about how to improve education all day, but let's fund it first so our students don't have to worry about their debts for years. How do we fund it? Higher taxes.
Do you have any justification for this? Or should this just be accepted because you said it's not a good idea?
I don't see an argument anywhere in your post saying why not. Other than as a general rule you are against taxes. Does that mean we should eliminate the fire dept and police dept as well because they're funded by taxes? Or is it only services that already exist are grandfathered in and new services shouldn't be created?
I can provide a counterexample: the best higher ed system in the world operates as a free market.
> Other than as a general rule you are against taxes.
And where did you get that from? In the future, make sure to carefully read comments before replying.
To recap:
I said that we should stop arguing about why school is expensive and instead focus on funding it so American college students don't have to carry a debt for the rest of their lives. I then said that the way to pay for their tuition is to increase taxes.
Bullshit.
Relatively recently, the very top students lived in crappy dorms and ate standard issue cafeteria food and worked out in mediocre gyms. None of which mattered. Because they had top rate professors and high academic standards and intelligent peers competing against them. Throwing away money on fancier buildings and food does absolutely nothing to increase the quality of education.
Government paid higher education usually don't care that much about getting top students. They may or may not come. This attitude makes saving on all the extra stuff pretty easy.
Anyway, not all universities can have top students, by definition, so most universities' generous facilities are wasted in an arms race they can't win.
By definition, not all schools attract the top students. We need a range of schools for the range of our society, not schools wasting the money of students actually attending the school competing for students that won't attend.
Schooling, like roads and health care, work better when run by government.
I definitely see the merit in comparing the US to Europe in terms of what has worked. Even as I am cautious, I value societies willing to experiment and progress forward with solutions to problems.
I'm not sure the US system is amenable to the same thing, but I'll bow out at that point and merely listen to what others have to say.
What I do suspect is that the landscape is changing with regards to what jobs need a degree and how easy knowledge is to obtain.
It just runs counter to the goals of our capitalist overlords to have a bunch of learned folks running around. That's why you don't see it. That's why "ivory tower elites" is such a common, cliched even, pejorative. Don't want too many smart folks! They might wonder where all the money's been going for the last 40 years, and might not be so quick to blame immigrants or brown people.
Throwing more money at this problem will hardly combat this issue (it's an issue in my opinion).
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/us-states-highest-paid-public...
Equity is fundamentally in the same boat - it's really the same thing as a loan, except the repayment term is a percentage of the economic output of a business venture. There's even some cool math-y economics about how the value of a firm doesn't change when you change the capital structure, so replacing $100M of equity with a $100M corporate bond just shifts risks from bondholders to shareholders.
Anyhow, the short story is that the West is having fewer children later. This means fewer currently-productive members of society per retiree. So, larger amounts of savings/debt required, which means better terms need to be offered in order for the market to clear.
The issue, IMO, comes down to decades of budget cuts from state legislatures that ends up being borne by the students. The "fees" end up paying for new buildings for student use, which used to be part of the budget allocation from the state. The "tuition" partially is related to increased administration costs, and partially due to the fact that budget allocations have been frozen for 10+ years but they still have to give professors a COL increase if nothing else.
TL;DR: state budgets have been static for a decade or more while more students are trying to attend. If they want to have classrooms and facilities for these students, and they can't get more money from the states, then they need to raise tuition or hit up donors to build them.
The taxpayers still cover the cost of stadium and other facilities at state schools, usually via bond issues.
If you want to tackle a good portion of the high cost of higher education tackle medical costs. It influences the cost of everything in the US. If you earn $50,000 a year the university is paying another $10,000 - 20,000 for insurance.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athlet...
How do you incentivize a group of politicians to intentionally do that?
(I went to a humble college, got a degree that doesn't do much more than tick boxes on job or visa applications, and enhanced it with self-study to get an effective education. I feel no obligation to send donations back to my college.)
Instead of investing directly in public universities, we decided to provide grants and loans (but mostly loans) directly to students to use at any university, public or private. This simply created a bubble, similarly to the mortgage lending bubble. College tuition in the US is just another over-inflated asset class.
https://www.seccountry.com/alabama/alabama-football-reported...
It might be wise to not link to an article in which every single sports program is massively profitable as an example of how college sports are causing financial issues. There's an argument to be made for that, but that link isn't it.
The big sports programs are profitable, but not all of them.
I guess many state schools do have successful sports programs with big TV deals. For example, 2 of the highest paid NCAA football coaches are in self sufficient programs at state schools in just 1 state: http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/08/big_10_schools_l...
Upkeep is not $50 million.
For another, there are quite a few college athletics programs that fund themselves through ticket sales, televised game revenue, televised show revenue, and private donors.
It's the same reason healthcare is so expensive.
I'm not a fan of the sports-fetish of college sports, but I do want to make a balanced point for others to consider.
Let's ask some nice people at NCAA to quantify those boatloads.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ncaa-revenue-expense-report-2...
"Of the 120 athletic departments in Division I-A (sorry, the Football Bowl Subdivision) just 22 were self-sufficient last year. That's actually actually an improvement from 2009, when only 14 schools turned a "profit.""
So sure boatload could be a mischaracterization, but majority certainly isn't.
The German system is nearly comparable. Only 10% of Germans are accepted to Gymnasiums followed by Universitat. If you test highly enough to qualify there, your college is free. Other students get free trade school.
Perhaps America should expand scholarships to more students instead of eliminating them along with other cuts? We seem to have far too much money for sports programs and war while cutting everything else. I've never seen any highly-placed leaders propose that war plans involve a cost-benefit analysis or that cuts should go to the men's football team.
I performed pretty badly before my high school (gymnasium) but after that I performed well as I found what I was interested in. But I didn't have like the best scores but I still have a good education in IT and works as a competent programmer today.
Perhaps I wouldn't be as successful if college weren't free in my country. It's just stupid not to offer college for free. A less educated population leads to bad things. Just see who the US president is.
Think it is time to update Godwin's Law.
That's simply not true. There are vastly more academic scholarships available than athletic scholarships. Athletic scholarships are regulated and limited to ensure that all schools can compete on even ground for student athletes. Even if you have an athlete who is a star student on academic scholarships it counts against the schools athletic limits.
Aside from academic performance based funding, there is also plenty of needs based funding in the US. We have a set of standard forms that everybody who wants financial aid fills out, and a determination is made based on their personal and family financial situation as to how much financial aid they qualify for - which can come in the form of funding directly from the institution, federal and state grants, and in subsidized or guaranteed loans. It stops there for most people, but it doesn't have to. You don't _have_ to get loans, you can seek out independent scholarships, grants, and other means of financial assistance. There's something for everyone - for people who live in urban areas, for people who live in rural areas, for people with certain ethnic backgrounds, for people who represent a particular struggle or ideal, etc. etc. etc. A lot of those scholarships don't amount to much individually - $500 here, $1500 there, but even $25 is $25 that you don't have to borrow.
There are frequently less expensive housing options, dining options, book options, etc. that can be taken advantage of. There are frequently options for students to earn money while in school.
I don't know about german students, but I do know that Sweden has "free college" as well, and their students generally come out of school with just as much or more debt than students in the US.
I just registered to point this out: This is completely untrue and has been for decades. Just have a look at this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiturientenquote_und_Studiena... wiki article, the table on the right should give you an idea how the development looks like, even if it's in German, the "B erechtigten, Ges." column shows the percentage of pupils that get the Abitur (the certificate that qualifies you to study at an university).
It's been pretty much half of each year of pupils for a while now.
Many kinds of education are cheap to free. You can learn how to make a brioche, read Chinese, cultivate roses, or write a compiler for almost nothing. It's degrees from universities that are expensive.
25% want to get everyone at the same horse stall starting gate, and then compete. Getting to the same starting gate involves some socialism, but it's supposed to neutralize things like race, class, gender, geography. And then you compete.
Those two groups are fighting which is why the political situation is why it's so acrimonious right now.
And a 3rd group, 50%, maybe give a crap but they hate politics and don't get involved.
Also, most of education happens at a state and local level, where political participation is pretty dreadful so you get even more extremes, and pretty much right now overwhelmingly counties in the U.S. are red/Republican states and they think already there's too much money spend on public schools, and more public money should go to private schools, i.e. make things competitive.
(Hilariously, Republicans think in health care, an option to buy into Medicare to make things more competitive is evil, probably because it's evil whenever the government does something good.)
You do realize the education is not really "free", right? That word is such a red herring. It's just tying up resources in a way YOU like, at the expense of other people's preferences.
Many people here, teachers and doctors included, are deeply unhappy with what this centrally-planned-one-size-fits-all turns out to imply for their professional status and career prospects.
It seems everyone is freaking about the original article, but I actually see it as positive news. The value of some good/service has been calibrated by the market and rational people are taking note.
In fact, given the recent trend in (some?) US colleges (Bret Weinstein at Evergreen, Nicholas Christakis at Yale, Berkeley...), I'm surprised this break-even point hasn't occurred earlier. Too little bang for too much (tax-payer) buck.
Education is just one other thing that is simply good for everyone and something you shouldn't have a less opportunity in because you had the "wrong" parents.
But if you're from a paradise country as you say, I assume you enjoyed your free education and now just simply shit on it for no good reason. Do you think you could've really afford it since your parents probably didn't save up? Unless you would have worked your ass of in several years and saved every dime you could not. It was probably good for you with free education, as it is good for the society.
Listen, these are not novel concepts. The ideology of "grand social good trumps individual interests (and I decide what that good is)" has been tried repeatedly, around the world. Its long-term effect on human psyche and society are well documented (try some Solzenitsyn).
"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
But it's always "This time is different! NOW we finally have the RIGHT social formula!!". Well, I have some bad news for you, sunshine. I'm not "shitting on education for no good reason". The efficiency tradeoffs that come with increased system complexity are real, the break-even ROI points are real. Your wishful thinking notwithstanding.
Just google the people from my previous post, for god's sake.
>The efficiency tradeoffs that come with increased system complexity are real, the break-even ROI points are real.
But what do you mean by this concretely, are you saying that if we can find an financial deficit by offering college free then we should stop? Would you say that there is no other good offered by higher education than that measured in monetary gain for the individual & society?
When I transferred to a state university, my yearly tuition was ~6k, which was a great deal since it was a prestigious place as far as public schools go.
> I never paid for a class
Your survivor bias makes you think that is the case for everyone. It isn't. State schools are no longer affordable in most regions of the U.S. without high debt load. It is true that community colleges for the most part are affordable, but the acceptance rate of students coming from community college is not optimal.
I congratulate you on your considerable achievement. You truly earned it through your hard work and good fortune to receive the grants and scholarships.
Many students had the misfortune of being raised in states without affordable state schools, despite being willing to put in the same amount of effort that you did.
[1]: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/grade-inflation-colleges-with-th...
Because community college was so cheap, I was able to use that other funding to pay for a graduate degree and part of my PhD program.
It's not expensive, people just have goofy ideas about what being educated means.
There are options for cheap schooling out there.
I think, though, the point is worth mentioning: not all community colleges are as good as the ones I've been to. Students would be well advised to consider the options and opportunities prior to matriculation (especially in light of an order of magnitude difference between even state university and community colleges).
That's not to say you're wrong, but you can't judge every community college program the same. Some of them aren't great (Especially if it's involving online labs, like you pointed out), but some are extremely good.
Do you think they'll give me my money back?
[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/03/when-students...
There are some worthwhile tricks, where you do 2 years at a community college, transfer credits to the state university, and finish a degree there and you get a diploma from the state university.
Most community don't offer 4 year degrees. When people are talking about community colleges they are generally talking about a place where you get an associates degree and then transfer.
Please don't put insults like this in HN comments. Just one can ruin a whole thread.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""
Many countries outside of Europe have tuition fees. Do we really have to label those countries as not part of the modern world?
The entire debt was interest free and repaid out of my tax return once I started full time work (i.e. I effectively paid higher tax rate until I had paid off my university debt).
The expensive part in Australia is not cost of university. It is all the living expenses and other costs while you are studying (rent, food, transport etc.) In some cities like Sydney cost of living is stupidly high especially compared to low wages you'd get doing typical student work (waiting tables, bar tending etc).
Paying for tution with tax money doesn't make it free. If you aren't willing to invest in yourself, why should society do so?
Free college tuition is a waste of resources on the upper middle class.
Because society has an interest in a large, well-educated labour pool that its entrepreneurs and companies can draw from. They can then employ these people, and pay them high salaries, a part of which goes back to education, and there you have a positive spiral.
Second, college is a good cut of because it's highly specialized education.
Third, almost all the benefits are captured by the precipitant of the education.
Finally, most of the country would either be unsuited or uninterested in college education. To a person breaking their back doing roofting, they might as well be buying rich kids trips to Europe instead. Not only does free college only benefit a portion of society, it benefits a portion that doesn't need a subsidy.
Scientific and technical knowledge drives innovation. Economic growth on a per-capita basis is entirely driven by innovation. Thus scientific and technical education directly impacts your quality of life.
With regards to liberal arts education, I'm inclined to agree that government subsidies may not be the best use of tax money.
Who do you think will start going to college more once it's free? Students who are driven to get a STEM career are already pursuing college. Making it free will attract the people who think along the lines of "I don't wanna start working yet, might as well go live the college lifestyle for free and get a sociology degree before I end up as a barista anyway." (I'm exaggerating slightly but you get the idea).
To be fair, I'm not totally against (at least partially) funding certain liberal arts degrees either. Specifically, creative writing and journalism are both valuable. For example, it would be profitable to subsidize many thousands of creative writing students to produce more popular writers like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. Total yearly sales of fiction books in the US is ~14 billion, taxes from that could cover subsidies for creative writing if they were merit based.
College / university is specialized knowledge that is typically used for career and social status advancement. Its helpful and has utility, but it's not necessarily required to be a functioning adult that lives in and contributes to society
They are of course not the fastest way to learn. Learning quickly is a secondary or even tertiary goal. If you want to learn something the fastest, you gotta teach yourself or use a tutor.
That does not mean free college for everyone. There would still be a stringent entrance exam. It means free college for those who are qualified.
Contrast that to the system now where college is seen as just another marketing device to squeeze profit out of the young and naive. This is not healthy for society and it is not sustainable.
By the way, your jab about publicly funded college tuition being a "fairy tale" flies in the face of the reality of many, many, many countries. Completely unnecessary and ignorant comment.
Despite the numerous issues with the american primary/secondary education system, I'd imagine you'd struggle to find many arguing that making secondary education free to everyone (qualified or not) wasn't a net benefit for the US.
It is my personal feeling that the entrance exams that used to exist as a barrier to secondary education were awful and unfair. Everyone should have a right to choose their direction, instead of being told you have to start a job/family. Based on the success of eliminating that barrier, I feel opening up university/college to everyone should be the goal of any civilized society.
In the US there is one more fundamental issue that needs to be addressed: the use of local school funding in school districts. Had schools been properly funded with more funds going to schools that need more resources (I.e schools where parents don't have higher education get more money per student than schools where they do) then having grades/tests as a qualification for free can be done without discriminating.
Perhaps even more needs to be spent, or the money is spent the wrong way? It would otherwise seem as though DC students are impossible to teach - which seems odd.
But in 90% of cases throwing money at it will help most problems a politician will face. More teachers or better teachers is doable without more money but it's hard. That means you need better school administrators that will attract and develop good teachers - but it's the same argument again - how will you get those?
The objection might be that it's not the most efficient use of money - which depending on your political views might be more or less terrible.
These are the similar arguments that went on in the late 1800's and well into the 1900's. Society (at that time) determined it was not beneficial or better to simply do job-specific training. So they opened up secondary education to everyone, for free. I'm happy they did and feel it was great for society, despite the cost. I'd like to believe we've progressed enough as a society to open the next levels of education to everyone as well.
It doesn't mean it is right for everyone, but the individual should be able to choose. They shouldn't be barred because they don't have money or the right activities on their transcript.
But high school for all is generally considered by everyone to be a Good Thing and having a more educated populace is good for everyone: jobs change, times change, and generally educated, intellectually flexible citizens are better able to adapt with the times, vote intelligently, be part of modern communities, etc. You can go to a trade school after high school.
We've come along far enough it's time to recognize that high school is no longer good enough as a general education, and that's a good thing: a college education where students study philosopy, history, science, mathematics is now the basic standard for an educated citizen and we should provide it to them regardless of how wealthy their parents are or how well they take IQ tests.
(rather than the creeping credentialism we choose now)
But there is more than one way to become educated.
I am not convinced that college is the most cost effective method of producing an educated population.
That usually do not take long for americans. If you have kids you can do it when they're small so they are ready for university when they come of age.
I knew students back in Mexico preparing for their Abitur exams for Germany at the end of high school (in all fairness, they were coming from bilingual private high school, which is a extreme luxury in Mexico, but still way below what college tuition in the U.S. looks like at most research universities...).
As for the salary, I can only say a German computer science graduate being offered a real programming job would probably laugh at anything below 45K, and is looking at around 50K. After tax this comes to around 30K/year (don't quote me on this number), which will be enough to live if you're single, for more costs of living you can check numbeo.com
Um, the post I was responding to mentioned getting residency in Europe in order to take advantage of the university system, so....
Otherwise, totally agree with your last point. It's a shame we Americans, in our infinite political stupidity, devalue and denigrate tax-funded programs.
Otherwise, someone is paying for it. If its a bad investment, its a bad investment, whether tax payers or students pay
Just one of the things that has been lost in our rapid head first plunge towards third world status.
Colleges employ people and build buildings and have ongoing costs. Taxpayer money would need to be used to pay for this, and that money must have continued value, otherwise no amount of money would actually get the job done (see Venezuela)
Not everyone learns valuable skills at college. You have to watch out for conflating "learning valuable skills" with "occupying space on a college campus."
Think of it this way: do you think having a large college educated population is a net good or a net bad for the US?
That is to say, if college (more often than not) turned criminals into saints, and turned a welfare recipient into Erdos, then it would be an excellent investment for society.
But there's no evidence it does this, and it doesn't even do a better job than high school. You can learn more on youtube than you do in college.
So until then, it's a marketing racket that transfers state money into a few private hands- and the gov't goes around collecting for decades.
In the case of roads, the answer is usually yes. The value they add is clear (at least until flying everywhereis the new economic norm).
People are willing to pay local taxes, tolls, insurance, licensing fees, gas taxes. A good portion of this money goes to road building and upkeep. Some of it is syphoned off and goes to other things.
If the proportion falls out of balance, and in parts of this country it does, then it no longer becomes "worth it", because of corruption and misuse.
If you've ever drive i95 from the Bronx to Stamford CT, you'll notice the portion in NY is in absolute disrepair, but the CT portion is very nicely paved. And yet, both states are flush with money. So what gives?? Mismanagement of public funds is the cause.
Similarly, if college (a 4 year holding tank after high school) is so much better than secondary education, vocational education, and self-teaching through books and youtube, then we can continue investing in it.
But since it isn't clear that college is better than these cheaper alternatives, it's just a way for public money to be siphoned from your wallet to someone else's.
It most definitely isn't free, unless you avoid the variety of taxes in our society. In which case, I applaud you for living a non-traditional and very self-sufficient life :)
While I think that's a more beneficial setup as a whole I think it'd be a tough sell given the attitude the U.S. has towards higher education. I think a lot of people put a value in higher education beyond its economic return on investment. In other words, even if it's a less return on investment pursuing higher education provides the additional benefit of avoiding the stigma of not having a degree.
In my ideal world, the U.S. would offer much greater subsidies to attend university but at the same time be much more selective with who gets into universities to begin with. That, coupled with better connecting high school juniors and seniors into technical education paths.
Then you would only have to worry about living costs and those loans are pretty small. I could pay off mine in like 4-5 years if I really wanted to. Plus, then people still could get an education even if their parents didn't save up for you.
What about as a society/culture you start telling people that the country should offer education for free instead of not getting educated?
EDIT: For the butthurt americans, I don't mean that your country isn't modern and I understand that not every country even in europe offer free education. I just think a modern country should offer free education as they offer free roads to travel on.
It works great in every country that has it, why do you think the US would suffer if you started doing the same?