Would you be better off if all publicly funded roads where instead private and required you to pay tolls per usage? You would defiantly get an bill more matching your usage, and people who don’t drive would pay less. But it at least feels like we are better off with public roads because they all add value to society as a whole.
The same goes for education. You don’t care about Akkadian studies, but perhaps someone does who thanks to his education can focus on that and earn enough money to buy a car from you auto mechanic keeping him in business making life better for you.
In the past, when a smaller percentage of people were "educated" the marginal value of educating an extra member of society was very high. It seems much lower to me now that information is cheap and freely available.
People who use roads should be paying a lot more for their usage and they should be paying much more directly. So, in short, yes.
The current system is far too diffuse, masks enormous externalities, and generates incredible waste.
Especially grateful for the Islamic Civilization course giving me an informed attitude toward Muslim friends and colleagues, and for my Latin and French studies helping my SAT scores and enabling me to immigrate to Quebec.
My degree was in computer science overall. Though aspects of student life and paid employment at my university helped my career and skillset way more than even the CS classes.
In my particular case, my parents paid for my education, but they could only afford that because US science education funding policies when they were students let them gain cheap entry to well-paying professions. Both of their undergraduate degrees were in the humanities.
Before that, my one grandfather who went to college got a good education at what was then a free city university, and I'm sure it helped his attitudes toward my dad's education. Many of my great-grandparents were poor Jewish immigrants at a time when the US immigration policies were extremely open for healthy light-skinned immigrants from Europe (even their low-class type).
I've had several high-paying tech jobs and paid plenty of taxes to society, but clearly these elements of my family history are factors in enabling that, not just anything about my career-related classes.
All of which is to say, we all benefit from affordable education, in surprisingly broad ways that rebound down generations and across spheres of activity. We shouldn't take a narrow vocational approach to this.
It’s commonly understood that “free” in the context of public services means paid for collectively by government. We totally get that and are still cool with it.
Your return on investment comes later when they’re paying taxes, which are on average higher than they would have been without assistance.
At scale, this kind of investment will pay for itself. There will undoubtedly be outliers on the down side you’d be able to point to, but did you know that philosophy degrees are disproportionately represented among CEO’s?
Don’t pick the subjects, just invest in it all and reap the rewards.
It will help offset your "social assistance" costs as well. Food stamps, housing supplement, welfare... education gets people out of that.
Spend money to make money.
I did know this, but I wonder which way the causality goes. perhaps CEO's are disproportionately likely to have come from wealthy families who could afford to send them to elite liberal arts colleges and/or afford to pursue a degree without direct applications.
Your thinking is flawed in this regard. Sure you are paying "my" tuition fees. But in an either indirect or direct way, you (you as the society, not necessarily you as the single person) are also profiting from my services. And as you are more than a being measured by money, but a human with a cultural background, even studying Akkadian on taxpayer's money might be ok (as long as not everyone does it).
I am a semi-libertarian myself so I get your argument somehow. Then again I am for equal opportunity (not equal outcomes) and providing education for free is a great equalizer and a great way that people can actually live up to their potential (or not, in which case they still need well educated doctors, car mechanics, whatever...). Good education also does not have to be really expensive by itself, it is a matter of organizing. When I hear the big US universities hording billions, I know that there is too much money in the system.
>Countries like Germany show
All these kids are more than welcome to go to Germany and save $500K in tuition fees.
Yet... that would cease to be the case. You wouldn't be paying for rich people's education. You'd be paying for education for whatever person put in the study time to be a doctor, based on actual merit instead of merit + money. It means that you would have that same chance at schooling. It would mean that doctors could make less money and it probably more likely to live in areas with fewer doctors. And hey, if they become rich, they'll be paying it back into the system and paying for more education that you, as an average-income worker, ever would.
Maybe if you had had free education you could have been a high income guy, perhaps even a doctor!
Once higher education is a public service and not a personal investment, there is much lower returns expected.
Be careful what you wish for, brain drain is a real phenomena.
Countries like Germany show that university/med school can both be free and high quality. Od course also in Germany some private elite universities exists where you have to pay (it is ok, I like diversity). But to get a perfect career, a state run university is all you need.