I believe people who support such things think as follows:

1. $15k a year tuition for 4 years is a great deal if it turns you into a banker or programmer with a $150,000 a year salary and a 40-year career. Indeed, it would be unjust for a garbage man's taxes to be paying for a stockbroker's education.

2. Majoring in poetry might not be such a clearly great decision, but if you're on the left politically, banning poetry is anti-intellectual; and if you're on the right market demand is its own justification.

On the poetry point specifically, I really think writing degrees in general would be more successful if they were granted by trade schools (i.e. a focus on doing the thing, not a focus on academic scholarship about the thing).

To be fair, we also have compulsory schooling for that period as well, and it makes complete sense to use tax revenue to pay for something the same government is making you do.

Note that I don't oppose the use of tax revenue to fund voluntary education, and I personally benefited heavily from it. Its just that using the example of the government paying for something it made mandatory is not much of an argument in itself for having it pay for something that is voluntary.

Education and improving society floats all boats, just as the garbage man is dependent on people generating trash. Stocks fund companies that employ people who generate trash. That was a very narrow, short-sighted analysis of tax policy.

With loans, the govt both makes a return on the interest AND a lifetime increase in net tax revenues.

Value of a college education goes beyond salary, and ideally creates a better informed citizenry.

My town currently spends about $12,635 per pupil for public schools. Other towns in the state spend over $20k. Compared to that, $15k tuition seems right in line.

I think university could be cheaper than it is today, but probably not much cheaper than K-12.

The idealized form of studying is education with mentoring, see Blooms 2 sigma results.

But that is too expensive, who wants to have that number of teachers ! It would cost a fortune!

So instead people try to cut costs, and or keep making it a discussion on price, since this is America, instead of just making colleges public and free.

These things and reputations take years and tons of willpower and planning, so the risk of falling behind is immense.

Good professors are rare. Good classmates are rare. Distributed education lets benefits from the former scale, albeit with degradation. There is no known way to scale access to the network of a good college experience.

Education quality varies with respect to both of the above. As a result, there is a scaling limit. As a result, there will be scarcity until the preconditions are solved or the scaling limits released.

There is more value in a Princeton diploma than a Princeton education.

There would be fine tuning in the numbers and parameters but that would kill price as a signal as a good thing as it forces either public rates or exorbitant private school which thinks they can actually make more without the massive prime consumer pool.

That's also ignoring that FBS is basically advertising. There's been a steady increase in applications (and subsequently an increase in average GPA and similar numbers) at University of Alabama under Nick Saban, and I know I would have been less likely to go to Virginia Tech if it wasn't for their football program drawing me in when I was in middle/high school.

Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma did more to take the University of Connecticut to national prominence than 100 deans. And Auriemma did it by excellence in a non-revenue sport.

While Mark Few at Gonzaga made the NCAA tournament 20 years in a row, this small Jesuit school in Spokane doubled the number of applicants, increased the proportion of students from outside Washington, increased incoming student test scores and dramatically grew the endowment.

Big brand name schools that are regularly competing at top level in sports are usually seeing huge financial surplus due to sports.

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...

Are you forgetting the entirely free K-12 option here that most people grow up with?

>$15k/yr is not expensive

Ok....

My kids' school spends $21k/pupil/year.

https://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/quality-counts-2019-st...

We distributed the cost, but 15k a year is absolutely unaffordable for most Americans.