I don't either. Most of the life-long value I got from college was not in the concentrations I was required to choose from. The real value was in the broad exposure to many disciplines, endeavors and POVs. Especially important in that were the hundreds of talented people I got to talk with ... a valuable extracurricular available at many schools.

Many people find satisfaction in work unrelated to what they thought they wanted when they were 18-20. Maybe they discovered other options they weren't aware of. Maybe their prospective specialities disappeared over time, maybe their values changed as they matured. A whole person is about more than income or ability to match some arbitrary standard.

In short noone should assume they know what an 18-20 yo is going to wind up doing (even if all goes well in their life). Nor do they (let alone their unfocussed 'advisors') know what occupations will stick around. A huge investment and a 4-year degree seems unwise and un-called for at this point. Never mind what 'tradition' says. Unless you're looking to be an academic, two years at first seems more reasonable. Less debt, less pressure. Get started, go try yourself in the crucible.

Five years later, that vagueness has been clarified by life experiences. At that point, the wisdom of a big investment might make more sense. 25 can be a lot more focussed than 20.

I don't see anything wrong with it either. I think it's a great thing that American doctors and engineers still get a liberal arts education, and it'd be wonderful if nobody in the US ever felt like finances were stopping them from getting the education they want.

But that's different than having a plan for your life. Most kids can't afford to wait until after college to start planning.

this sounds like a really bad way to spend my tax dollars. by all means, use them to educate the next generation of teachers, social workers, and scientists, but don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years and still need government assistance at the end.

> don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years

This is completely false. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Art history students subsidize the cost of education for STEM students.

At least in Canada, your tuition is the same whether you study a STEM field or art history. But STEM has greater costs association with teaching, i.e. lab equipment, lab technicians' salaries, shop spaces, computer labs, etc. Much of social sciences and humanities teaching is based on a JSTOR subscriptions and a computer projector in the basement of a crumbling concrete building built half a century ago in the far corner of campus. 90% of the money that Social Science and Humanities students pay goes to fund the STEM programs.

you're not wrong, but read the context of the thread. I am replying to a proposal for free college as a taxpayer.

You are already footing the bill for the art history student to go through over 12 years of education, what's 4 more?

honestly not quite sure how to respond to this. the obvious response to "what's 4 more?" is that it's a lot more money than zero more, and each of those last four years is going to be considerably more expensive than a year of grade school.

I don't mind having my tax dollars go towards helping young people establish stable careers so they can become self-sufficient. I also don't mind paying to educate them so the can go out and help the needier members of society. I just don't think stuff like art history is a good investment of public money. I have a lot of friends who got art history degrees, which is why I use this example. they had a great time in school, but they would be hard pressed to point to any tangible benefits from the degree. most of them ended up having to pursue certifications for unrelated fields.

As I mentioned in a prior post (and which, as you correctly noted, did not adequately recognize the context of the thread), the cost for educating social scientists and humanists is minimal (though certainly not negligible, especially if we aspire to providing a good education rather than a bottom-of-the-barrel and grossly underfunded degree, which is currently the norm). However, I'm wondering what you consider to be tangible benefits? And to who?

The benefits of a degree in social sciences or humanities are ways of thinking that can be applied in various fields of practice. Students in these programs literally learn how to think and argue effectively, especially about social issues and social systems. This goes way beyond the first year sociology class that computer science students are 'forced' to take as an elective. Techies without social science or humanities backgrounds are notoriously bad at thinking about social systems, and end up developing extremely problematic socially-embedded tools and technologies. If we consider many of the problematic tech of the past decade (intrusive surveillance tech, under-moderated social media, crispr genetic modification, etc), they were all designed without such considerations in mind, and have had detrimental effects on society. It's sad that we continue to not 'get it', that thinking properly about human experiences and systems, as informed by specialists who deal with this specifically, is crucial.

This is not only true about tech fields. When social science and humanities graduates enter post-grad programs that actually recognize the value of such prior education (i.e. medical schools that accept students with bachelor or arts, which is surprisingly rare) these students actually tend to perform better. Public policy designed by social scientists and humanists also works more effectively, but instead we have huge lobbies funded by the tech industry and management firms pushing for de-regulation or regulation designed by those technocrats themselves (i.e. sidewalk labs in toronto).

It’s certainly not something I want limited tax dollars to pay for, given that we still have childhood poverty and homelessness to work on.

Our economy generates enough wealth to take care of those people too.

Let's convince taxpayers to raise taxes to pay for those things first, then worry about subsidizing four years of binge drinking and sex for middle class kids.

Student debt is a main driver of poverty and homelessness. Solving the student-debt crisis will reduce the poverty and homelessness and reduce the burden placed on programs meant to deal with those issues. It may be cheaper in the short term to just pay into those services, but why should people suffer before getting relief, when suffering could be prevented altogether?

Also, your impression about what college students actually do is completely unrepresentative of the experiences of those who are grateful for the opportunity to have an education, i.e. the people who would most benefit from having the costs of their education subsidized, i.e. those who go in with few opportunities and come out with many more. The only people who party are those who could already afford to live their lives normally after they graduate, or the people getting degrees in high-return fields (i.e. business and engineering).

> Student debt is a main driver of poverty and homelessness.

Source? Especially for the homelessness part.

Definitely. As long as we can get some guarantees that a good fraction of people who study for free contribute back to society without being treated like slaves.

All carrot with zero stick is not good just like all stick and zero carrot is not good.

Why should we pay for college for an area that won’t return a positive ROI just so they can be a “better citizen of the world”?

How are you going to measure ROI?

Back 2011 the Freakonomics guys said this:

> According to the College Board, a year of tuition at a public college for an in-state student costs an average of $7,605, while a year at a private college costs an average of $27,293. Meaning that (assuming you graduate in four years) a college diploma from a public school costs about $30,000, and about $109,000 from a private school. That’s a lot of coin, but consider this: the difference in yearly income for a person with a college degree and a person with just a high school diploma is $19,550, according to the 2010 Census. So keeping things simple, on average, a public school college degree pays for itself in less than two years, and a private school diploma in less than six. Which is probably why, according to the Pew study, the vast majority of college graduates (86%) say that college was a good investment for them.

Now things are more expensive, but even if the payoff is 2x or 3x longer now, it's still an overall good investment.

Plus, who knows what the benefits would be if the US were producing millions of great global citizens each year. If those global citizens helped educate and raise the world's poorest people out of poverty, those countries would likely stabilize somewhat and maybe that would ease conflict and spending on war.

And even if all the things I just said were wrong, sometimes ROI isn't a great way to value things. For example, journalism, especially at a local level, is hard to fund yet the value isn't zero. Lots of people who don't pay for news still benefit from having eyes on the powerful.

In that case, what’s wrong with the people who benefit from the education paying themselves? In a capitalist society, Journalism degrees should cost less than a STEM degree.

That seems like a good reason to me, as long as the debt load isn't severe. Plus, in my experience, education enriches the everyday profoundly.

The debt load will be severe. The US doesn't have a balanced budget, has a growing deficit at all levels (federal, state, municipal), and politicians are promising "free college", when we have bigger issues (child poverty, homelessness, healthcare, DEBT)?