> The government should be funding more for education, not cutting people off from it.

College costs an insane amount of money in the States. I'm not sure more money is the answer. The government should be pushing ways to make it cheaper. Ceasing to guarantee public student loans and making private debt more easily dischargeable in bankruptcy would be a great start.

Turn off the money firehose and colleges will return to their core competencies - teaching and research - instead of building football stadiums, basketball arenas, and doing other stuff that's irrelevant to a good education. They may also differentiate by having tuition prices better reflect costs and future job prospects. So for example art, writing, polisci, history degrees may cost way less than engineering, science or medical degrees. Making community-college-to-state-college transfers easier would be another thing to try.

Basically there are many things one could do to expand access to college, and leave students better off, without spending more tax money.

To me the solution is simple, make college debt dischargable through bankruptcy. The only people who are actually going to declare bankruptcy are people who aren't and can't pay for their loans in the first place. It isn't just a simple reset button like people pretend, declaring bankruptcy has a serious repercussions, but at the end of it all they will end up in a better position and will contribute far more to the economy than they will stuck in a poverty trap.

I went to an excellent college, and I don’t think public money should be spent on “the college experience.” It’s not like American college graduates are leaving well versed in the works of Aristotle. We’re talking about spending tax dollars subsidizing what is mostly drinking/sex/video games/partying, with someone occasionally picking up a shallow idea.

Hold up. I know college is like that for some people, but not everyone. I pretty much never partied and spent my time studying at the library. I wouldn't have been able to usefully work on Rust without a lot of the PL theory that I learned at university—is Rust just "shallow ideas"? Before learning PLT I thought that the C type system was all anyone needed. I sure wasn't going to write an H-M style typechecker—the original version of which I wrote for rustc—for fun on my own time. (And I did end up with a decent knowledge of Aristotle, too.)

Are there too many people who get in to Ivy League schools just to party? Sure. But fixing that problem—which I agree is worth fixing—need not involve burning higher education to the ground and depriving those who are actually going to get use out of it.

> Are there too many people who get in to Ivy League schools just to party? Sure. But fixing that problem—which I agree is worth fixing—need not involve burning higher education to the ground and depriving those who are actually going to get use out of it.

Within Ivy League schools there are a ton of (very bright!) kids who get a degree just to have a credential they use to punch their ticket at a bank or consulting shop. And outside the Ivy League there are tons of kids who get a degree, spend a lot of time partying, to get a job they could have done without the degree. All told, probably a majority of people who get a degree today don’t need one. (Back when we sent a man to the moon only 10% of Americans had a college degree. It probably never needs to get higher than that.)

There is a place for public funding of college. We need engineers, doctors, even writers and journalists. And we need to address the plight of people from disadvantaged backgrounds. But I suspect you could get most of the economic benefits with a targeted system that gave out full ride scholarships based on merit, need, and plan of study, instead of making college into grades 13-16 as we have today.

> And outside the Ivy League there are tons of kids who get a degree, spend a lot of time partying, to get a job they could have done without the degree.

Reminds me of something I recently read. iirc, it was some local news story regarding a college student at a nearby state university. I remember someone asked him his plans after college and he replied something about wanting to start a landscaping business. I wondered why the hell someone would bother with all that debt for something that they could have started years ago.

>I pretty much never partied and spent my time studying at the library. I wouldn't have been able to usefully work on Rust without a lot of the PL theory that I learned at university

Did studying by yourself at the library really require being enrolled in a university though? I mean which part of this education is not indefinitely scalable? Pretty much only the personal attention of a professor. Did you require the personal attention of a professor to learn PLT? Somehow I don't think so.

>Before learning PLT I thought that the C type system was all anyone needed.

Using C for a while would've fixed that for you, too.

I surmise that pcwalton may have higher standards for "useful work on Rust" than the average HNer. (It is, after all, quite difficult to appreciate a "complex design" that doesn't yet exist - not in its current form, at least.)

> I mean Rust isn't exactly very difficult to use.

He's talking about working on Rust, not working in Rust. A Rust compiler, with its borrowing/type-checking, is an order of magnitude more complicated than one for C.

i know you're just being needlessly flippant, but, givenmost hs curriculum don't cover classical philosophy how is a student supposed to know they're interested in the field if not exposed to it during higher education ( i know I personally got into Foucault during conversations I had with classmates after snubbing the field like many an edgy teen).

Plenty of people meet their co-founders, find their passion, pivot their lives entirely during the time; even if the only activities a student takes are "drinking/sex/video games/partying" they're probably out making connections that end up serving them pretty well interms of employment/relationships.

Restricting access just so some group youve determined "doesn't deserve it" is elitist to the extreme. I'd much rather have 5% ( or more)of my income go to funding state run education rather than subsidizing my extracurriculars (which ironically are way more drinking/sex/video games/partying than I ever had time for in college).

I’m not being flippant. I don’t think college is valuable for most people, and the “four year vacation for already privileged kids” isn’t something I want to see public money being spent on.

As to being elitist: subsidizing college is a handout to people who are already pretty well off. The people who need help the most aren’t going to college. I’d very much like to see colleges defunded and that money redirected to social services for kids in high-need communities.

It's not a 0 sum game; it's very possible to have subsided education and meaningful social services; hell you can even deliver on economies of scale and do both academic out reach run by the local school with the intention of preparing applications from high-need communities.

In today's system if you can afford university with no debt you're very well off and it's probably a wash since the funds are coming largely out of your taxes (ie just about everyone that works in US tech and comments on this forum). The biggest winners are middle class families that can prepare their children for college but can't pay for it; but again, helping one group doesn't mean that it's no longer possible to help another group.

I can't see how restricting higher education back to the days when the hyper rich gathered to circle jerk about how much of the classics they've memorized helps in anyway (other than give all of us already educated in the workforce a lovely gate against the next generation).

The money is spent either way, whether it's tax dollars in a "free college" system or tuition dollars in the system we have or anything in between. Every dollar spent on college is a dollar that didn't get spent on some other service.

Meanwhile, if university education really is mostly a vacation for wealthy young adults, then funding it is regressive, because no matter how directly accessible you make it financially, it's still tilted towards the wealthy because they have the means to forego 4 years of income to attend, and because they're better prepared to apply and take advantage of it in the first place.

By that logic there should be no progressive programs at all because "someone" wealthy might also benefit. Especially in the current system, a college degree is overwhelmingly income positive[0]. Progressive programs don't imply the wealthy don't benefit just that the wealthy do pay for them. A student unable to afford university would be far better equiped to "forgo 4 years of income" (because there are so many well paying jobs for the highschool graduate in a low income area) if state schools were publically funded at the level they were 40 years ago.

A dollar spent on accessible college is just a dollar that can't be spent else where not necessarily a dollar taken from another services. Despite what some people might lead you to believe, taxes can be raised to pay for things (usually disproportionately affecting those wealthy people you're so concerned about getting a handout).

[0]https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/the-college-payoff/

This rebuttal pretends to say something, but really doesn't. Obviously, there are cases where subsidy makes no sense (universal free yacht moorings) and where it makes lots of sense (the fire department). The question is, where does a 4-year university degree fall on that spectrum? It's Rayiner's contention, and mine as well, though to a lesser extent, that college is a yacht mooring, not a fire department.

You can disagree, and then make your case, but you have to make it on the merits, not with mic-drop logic.

Note that my side already has a highly instructive example to argue from: the mortgage interest tax deduction, which turned out to be expensive, distortive, and highly regressive.

You're not going to get everyone into college. If you make the government pay for college then you're also asking those who couldn't go to college to pay for others to be able to go to college. Essentially, poor(er) people paying so that rich(er) people can drink/sex/video games/party.

Maybe you went to a great college. I went to a large state school, and the "college experience" there was not at all like you described it.

At best, it could be close to that if you chose the right major and friends. But the majority experience seemed closer to binge drinking, cheating on homework assignments, and wasting time in class by asking the professor if X was going to be on the test.

College is absolutely just a continuation of high school for most people, and I'm afraid it's going to become even worse as the demands for free college get louder.

I also went to a large state school (although to be fair, one that's fairly highly rated for STEM). Access to people, both socially and academically, access to information, access to opportunity (I did not get a degree in CS yet here I am making piles of cash in this field) all increase with the resources available at uni.

Asking a high school student, especially one that likely grew up in a small town with limited exposure to people careers, and ideas, to go into an uncaring workforce essentially unable to pivot for the rest of their lives sounds heartbreaking. I strongly believe that my opportunity should be available to every person.

As a side bar I think this probably should start way earlier than college; more well run state boarding schools would be a huge life line to high performing students stifled by their geography.