They all miserably failed? The US does this to an extent right now: we have a decent (of course it's not the best) public education system, and we have programs like SNAP/TANF/Section 8 so that children don't grow up underfed on the street. There's no reason it could not also be done globally; the global GDP/capita is about $15k.

Of course, simply providing these services doesn't always cut it. Look at the generational poverty in the US "ghettoes" for obvious confirmation of this. But in general it's a good thing to do and it benefits people. It's certainly not impossible and definitely does not always miserably fail.

For maximum potential, I mostly mean the ability to do what you want in terms of jobs with only intelligence and work holding you back, not the circumstances you were born in.

> we have a decent (of course it's not the best) public education system

What's your take on the current student loans situation where almost everyone is able to obtain resources to go to a limited number of colleges and pay for whichever degree they like? Should we expand this and instead of loaning money give it away for free, if this goes towards achieving maximum potential? In your opinion, how much would a regular 4 year degree cost in such a case?

We should be looking at ways to reduce the cost of college. Education doesn't need to be a hand-holdy 4 year summer camp, and I think the expectation that it should be is based on cultural expectations. The loan based payment model is only a problem because it's leaving a certain subset of students in a lot of debt with degrees that don't enable them to pay it off. I definitely don't think we should just give everyone unlimited money to study, nor do I think the solution is going the Western-Europe route of making college free, but only for the X% of students that do best on entrance exams.

Do you want to reduce the cost, or do you want to increase accessibility? There are a finite number of colleges, so reducing cost does not necessarily increase accessibility. An incentive to build more colleges may increase accessibility, but may or may not exacerbate prices.

Another model might be to increase subsidy for fields with more guaranteed profit centers, while decreasing the amount of subsidy for fields in which a career profit is less likely, such that loans are more likely to be paid off. This again may make college cheaper, and/or more accessible, but may fail to yield enough trained workers to deliver in necessary but unprofitable fields.

That said, I'm not just trying to poop on the idea, but to highlight that "cost" is not the only rubric of accessibility, and that "cheaper" doesn't necessarily yield the results you're looking for, and may actually result in contrary outcomes from what we expect.

I think there is a huge problem with the student loan method of funding college in that it causes much more inflation than simply funding public universities who in turn would supply low or no cost tuition.