Raise the income tax, create a VAT, kill the mortgage-interest tax deduction, add a Financial transaction tax, tax capital gains like normal income, stop subsidizing fossil fuel extraction, add a carbon tax, and lower the threshold for the inheritance tax and raise the percentage.

Instead, can we have a negative income tax?

Land, wealth, and other rents taxes.

Making college free is a huge waste of resources.

College is largely an exercise in social credentialing and signaling. If we make college free, the people who want to get ahead in society will just go to expensive graduate programs in order to distinguish themselves. Then the discussion will shift to fully funding those programs...

Our current system is very fair. Take out a loan if you need to, but make sure your post graduation prospects justify taking a loan out. If they don't, then don't get the loan.

One of the major reasons why college is so expensive today is because the availability of loans means Universities are able to continuously hike tuition in support of ever expanding bureaucracies (not in support of the core educational mission) without fear of students not being able to pay, because the loans mean students can always secure funding! Society is basically writing them a blank check... The answer is NOT to give them even more money!

College education has become a financial black hole that will only expand if we throw more money at it.

I have some bad news for you: graduate programs are usually fully funded and some PhD students even get a stipend for attending.

PhD students getting stipends are essentially contract employees. They are doing work, either as associate instructors or research assistants, for that money.

You prefer an under-educated population? The most valuable asset we have in the technology and service based economies is human capital. We need a creative and educated population to continue to compete. I think we should eliminate all for-profit education and preferably make all universities public.

Under educated population is a disaster, but that problem starts about 12 years before college, in a different all public/free education system.

Jamming more people through mediocre and worse college programs to get worthless degrees is a waste of time and money.

Why do you assume that degrees are "worthless?" How are you defining "worthless?" Based on the research, getting a degree significantly increases your earning potential. But I would argue that even if that wasn't the case and everyone got philosophy, literature, and history degrees, our country would be significantly better positioned globally.

And I agree with your statement that the problem starts earlier. Although most of our issues with primary and secondary public education can be traced to poverty and racism. So, I think we should raise taxes to address those as well :D.

You have to be careful with conflating causality. As we turn college more and more into highschool 2.0, we're going to see the correlation with increased earnings start to deteriorate. There's a simple matter that we're greatly increasing the supply of college educated individuals which, in turn, will have a diminishing effect on their demand which will drive earnings down. The only way this will not happen is if there's a proportional (which is to say sharp) increase in the number of available and desirable positions for college educated individuals.

This is also ignoring that we've greatly widened the demographic attending colleges. The reduced selectivity means that the average person is not going to be as top-notch as they were at one time, which means that the average expectation of an individual with a college degree will also go down. This will also have an aggregate depressing effect on our earning:education correlation. More important than ever will become median earnings for college graduates. The top graduates are earning vastly more than ever before which will mask the overall problem.

I’m referring to all the unemployed and underemployed college graduates complaining about the debt they are in. Simplify transferring the debt somewhere else isn’t fixing anything, it is just shifting the drain on society. College is highly useful for some people, and not others. We should do more to make sure it is available to those who would benefit, and offer different things for those who prefer or need trade skills.

Why do you proceed from the assumption that degrees have worth and demand that we prove that statement to be false?

In the real world it is the opposite - you assume the degree is worthless until you demonstrate the otherwise

Worthless = "no employer willing to pay good money for the skills or knowledge you acquired"

> You prefer an under-educated population

Who is undereducated? We managed to create a civilization that went to the moon back when the vast majority of people never went to college. Germany continues to be a leading industrial power while lagging most of Western Europe in college statistics (especially "academic" college like we have in the U.S.)

Is it possible to simultaneously have an over-educated population and an under-educated population? I am having a hard time squaring the two prevailing ideas on this issue. One is that we need more/free education because an educated population is best. The other is that we need to import vast amounts of new unskilled labor so we have someone to pick our fruit. I realize you only espoused one of these ideas, but I am curious if someone holds both those positions and would help me understand how both can be true at the same time.

If you define "educated" to be an expensive and worthless-to-the-world degree, then I am totally fine with an "under-educated" population.

People will still go for the degrees they go for today, which for the most part are degrees they believe will provide a good return on their investment of _time_. On top of that, unis would need to limit how many people are accepted to a penguin program, because how many qualified teachers can they throw at that?

Beyond admissions quotas, I imagine that if gov’t does decide to fully subsidize unis, they too will impose limits per field of study. This is already done in European countries that subsidize uni.

Finally, I think with “guaranteed” gov’t loans, unis have already taken a lot of their skin out of the game. They don’t have to worry about that student defaulting on their loan later, the gov’t does. Or even for private loans. If you had a seemingly infinite bank account, would you penny pinch or see how many new toys you could buy?

Then don't fund Shady St Uni. Put criteria in place for evaluating, and make sure the universities have skin in the game.

(Also, not every degree that doesn't immediately result in you making $250,000/year is worthless. And students are pretty motivated already in pursuing degrees that they see jobs in. Even if your education is free, if you put in 4+ years into something that you can't do anything with, you're still not profiting. Students themselves would still have skin in the game even with free education.)

Ok. Do that first and I might support it. But the guaranteed loans for everyone system of today has not only inflated costs, it supports a bunch of worthless crappy schools. Go look at the list of universities in the US, and find the bottom 100. They are as offensive and wasteful as a $10,000 toilet seat.

I agree. But that's not a product of free education.

It is a product of guaranteed government loans, which makes it “free” for universities to take students.

And here you see a difference between free and "free".

> Also, with no skin in the game, I’m sure college will get even less serious.

Or on the contrary, when students are no longer paying customers who have to be made happy, grading can get stricter

What's wrong with zoology / ornithology today?

Not sure why this is downvoted. There are plenty of degrees that might be useless for making an employer more money, but provide important work for society.

You can study whatever you want, wherever you want, without criticism or question if you are willing to pay your own way.

Very well, but what is your objection to zoology? Normally, people pick an arts subject when arguing about poor-value degrees.

Zoology is a biology course, so there's a general scientific background (research, hypotheses, statistics, modelling etc), and zoology in particular is necessary for understanding the spread of animal pests (e.g. insects eating pests), invasive species, human and animal disease (bird flu?), understanding/recording what is in a particular place (perhaps before construction work, or to guide the planning of that).

The report on the lowest- and highest-paying majors ranks zoology fairly highly -- above chemistry and physics: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/

As we had seen from free education in most of Western Europe.

I believe when most people say “make college free”, they’re referring to a “tuition free” education. There is still a housing cost, which is “skin in the game”.

Eh, my ideal would be like Europe's that gives you a stipend as well to cover room and board. Paying for housing is more than a full time job in a lot of places with universities (particularly the good ones), and ideally we'd want students to be focusing on their studies.

In many of those places in Europe, stipend is really a loan you have to pay back. The terms are regulated but still ain't free money.

Sure, reappropriate some of the US military budget ($717 billion).

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-approves-717b-defense-s...

Not a bad idea. There are 1.6M professors (including part time, but let's just assume they're full time). If we paid them 100K each, it would only cost $160B per year. So we can definitely afford to continue with a smaller military.

Obviously the amount of people enrolling and therefore the number of professors will have to increase. However some of that can be addressed by using more internet based lectures, etc..

Also, to backfill the loss to the military, they could require a significant portion of the degrees be in robotics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj1MCjeFxrM

We're going to really need that military when China, when we make degrees in underwater basketweaving free for everyone and China (which has a sensible approach to what education is and is not valuable) overtakes us economically and technologically.

Sure. Those invisible fighter jets that don't work were a great investment.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a21957/wtf-35/

The US military is a publicly funded socialist entity. Interesting how that's ok for war but not for education.

The U.S. military accepts something like 20% of its walk-in recruits. [0] When you imagine education as a "socialized entity," I strongly suspect you're not picturing an institution that rejects 80% of the population (for reasons like, say, being too fat).

[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/13/uncle-sam-d...

I don't think you understand. It's a thing we all pay for. It's a publicly funded service that defends the country. It's not about who gets in, it's about how it's paid for. We all pay together for something that is not explicitly for profit that we believe to be for the good of the country. This is socialism.

But also, to your point, colleges would still reject students based on grades. This happens in countries with free college education. Standards are still maintained but it doesn't depend on how much money you have. We would get the best candidates based on merit instead of their parents income.

On the contrary, I don't think you understand how college admissions work. When you're rejected by the military, there's no second- or third-tier back-up plan. But anybody who wants to go to college can go to college and they can get it paid for, no matter how unproductive or frivolous their major.

When Stanford rejects you, you try a state school; when the state school rejects you, you go to one of the state's less prestigious satellite campuses. If they reject you (which is extremely unlikely), you go to community college.

Federal aid is available at each strata.

Ok, sounds good, let's increase that federal aid and take the money from the military budget.

Can something be socialist when a private version could never exist?

Yes. That's not what defines it.

By that definition, isn't every military a socialist entity?

That's the point, isn't it?

The US right holds the contradictory opinions that socialized government can't accomplish anything effective, and that the US military (which is fundamentally a socialized entity) is amazing and awesome and supremely capable.

Yes

Look at how other countries in the world fund these things.

Germany even made University free for foreigners.

It's not free. There is no tuition, but at least in TUM (Munich) there is a 'student union and basic ticket' free. It's €129.40 per semester [1]. There are financial aid options available. This applies to all students regardless of nationality.

TUM is a top technical university by German, European and World standards. [2]

[1] - https://www.tum.de/en/studies/fees-and-financial-aid/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_University_of_Munich...

This discussion is ridiculous from an European standpoint.

In Germany all universities (with very few exceptions) are completely free and students have just to pay their cost of living (can apply for subsidies for that too).

There were many studies which showed that ANY fee is a deterrent for students from poor families.

In my opinion the current political development around the world shows that better education is absolutely required for humanity. Education should be financed via taxes (and taxes for high incomes should be increased accordingly to finance it).

I liked the financial transaction tax proposed by Sanders. France, Belgium, and Singapore manage to have this without being known as financial wastelands were no exchanges exist.

Additionally fully nationalize the public schools, and work to remove the administrative bloat that has occurred. I know that the libertarian side here on HN is going to see this and say "more government -> less overhead? does not compute", but hear me out. Their pseudo private status has set up the incentives to de facto remove education from the core mission of universities. Chasing grant money, real estate capital, and investments might technically make them more money, but that flies in the face of what they should be doing, IMO.

Taxes

I wasn't aware that professors in Germany were unpaid. Or that the NHS was purely volunteer. Or that either countries had abolished private industry in either of those contexts.

Oh wait, no, it just turns out that the turning point-esque meme that socialized services equates to free labor is just absurd.

Could you please not post like this? It's not what we're here for and we ban accounts that carry on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Wow! You are right! Nobody is entitled to anyone's labor! We should make sure we let the capitalists who use the labor of everyone around them to extract profits.

Nice. Got a bite. Clearly you view the world as a zero-sum game. That's not reality. Reality is - I need help to get something done. You and I talk about you helping me get something done. You and I agree to exchange X value for Y labor. You get something of value and I get something of value. Nobody forced either of us into the agreement... we both did so freely. Wow. So right! So simple! Me like freedom. Me go eat waffle.