I think many Americans would be offended if they woke up one day and their universities had stopped offering useless gender studies degrees.
I don't know why this is such a pervasive perspective, but it's really sad. This same logic extends to philosophy, theater, arts, psychology, sociology, and so many other disciplines. At which point, you're really just left with STEM, which seems to hint the preference is for trade schools (which do exist, but aren't favored). The loss of arts and social sciences would be a catastrophe for the academic world.
But a blessing for most students who need a job to pay their student debts after graduation. Sacrificing art students by taking their tuition knowing no or too few jobs exist is unacceptable. Keeping social sciences and art departments alive should require a source of money that does not create non-dischargeanle student debts and jobless students.
Software development, for example, very much falls under a trade, else there wouldn't be so many bootcamps that both feed into the industry and simultaneously take advantage of those who don't know better. There's no prestigious trade school that I'm aware of that produces consistently competent software developers. That's just one example, but I'd love to see more trade schools supported and elevated as a path to career employment.
It also wasn't intended for middle class people of average intelligence. Consider, before WW2 only about 10% of people attended college. You either came from money or you were a rather bright person. Today it is an employment gateway. People mainly attend to "get a good job", not for the pursuit of higher knowledge and "finishing". For those of humble origins that want to use it to discover themselves or become an "intellectual", well enjoy the 100k debt while slinging lattes.
MIT? At least, it was accused of being a trade school toward the beginning of its history:
> These reforms were largely a response to Walker's on-going defense of the Institute and its curriculum from outside accusations of overwork, poor writing, unapplicable skills, and status as a "mere" trade school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Massachusetts_I...
These days, one might think of U Waterloo as filling the role of a prestigious trade school given the focus they put on their co-op program. Which I mean in a positive light, of course.
But we need poor people to operate the machinery. They shouldn't be allowed to dream, write poetry, or do anything that we consider frivolous. The frivolous things are for the privileged to do.
Sorry. My sarcasm couldn't be contained.
The market might demand someone with experience in a certain field, but that doesn't mean that college is a useful way of preparing them for it.
Likewise, with the humanities I've learned much more outside of the University setting than inside of it. I never delved into primary sources or academic papers when I was an undergraduate, but often do both now that I'm out (as a hobby, not for work). I would say that I knew almost nothing about historiography coming out of college, and almost all my knowledge of it is from self-study after graduation.
People talk about the importance of discussions, but discussion groups I've had outside of university have been much more fruitful than inside - a group of people with ages ranging from teens to retirees, who've had a variety of life experiences and come from different countries is going to be a more varied discussion in my experience than a group of 19 year old college students.
I think people really have to start discussing what goals we're actually trying to achieve, if college is the best way of achieving, and what other alternatives might be available. In my experience, the college system is a pretty poor system that has survived as long as it has because of inertia.
College education in USA is ridiculously cheap if you are not looking at top colleges. Plenty of universities in silicon valley which can give you a wide array of useful degrees for very affordable price. Affordable = You can pay your student loans within 2 years of gainful employment post degree.
- Loosely speaking K-12 can be seen as a public good because of which it may make sense for the society to pay for other people's education. College education is not a public good in the same way because at any rate only few folks will go to college and it is immoral for the other people being forced to pay for college education of those kids. If college educated kids earn even more then it is even more immoral for poor people to pay for rich.
- Unlike K-12, college education involves specialization. A gender studies degree is worthless compared to say a nurse. But because education is free a lot of students might enroll in more and more worthless degrees. This will have great negative impact on productivity of US society. A lot of folks who do not have any productive skills, a lot of folks staying out of labour market in their crucial years. I will work at a local farm for a year rather than pursue some of the college degrees any days.
- When government pays for education it distorts the market. You can see it as a subsidy. But then it also means more and more worthless colleges which have more and more worthless degree programs that focus on "good life" for kids.
I always watch this video from time to time : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3-_r_t7AZU
The opposite of your specialization argument also applies. It costs $20,000-$40,000 to go through nursing school. It's hugely beneficial for society to have nurses, and we have a nursing shortage. Paying for nursing school means more nurses. On the other side, personally I'm in favor of there being a lot more people who have expertise in advanced non-STEM topics. The benefits are less obvious, but a well educated populace is far more desirable than a pile of folks educated just well enough to be useful as well.
Distorting the market is a problem, but just as high schools are public, I think increasing the number of public universities and public community colleges helps that problem. If there is enough high quality public education available, there's no need to subsidize private education.
that's covered in the video at around the 4 minute mark.
I think companies will live if people take a little longer to enter the workforce. If the tradeoff is a more educated populace and people spending less of their life toiling away vs. corporate profits maybe having a tiny decline then it's definitely worth it.
I guess we can barely pay for the present nowadays, nevermind the future.
Employers are not completely stupid, they notice the high school diploma is no longer signaling competency and start demanding university degrees for pretty basic jobs. We feel bad for people who can't get jobs, so we make it easier to get a university degree. You can see where this is headed.
If people are just doing it to get a job, well, why not set up and support trade schools instead?
If you do that, you severely limit social/economical mobility. Is that what you want?
Why would this limit social and economic mobility?
If it does limit social and economic mobility, does that mean our process for mobility is flawed? Does there need to be a reassessment of what is valuable in society? Are plumbers or mechanics "less valuable" than a business analyst or marketing professional? What about a hospice care worker or a grocer? Are we focusing on college degrees because of historical baggage? Should we have more courses in computer science or agriculture, or more courses in literature? More of all? Less of all?
Recall that social and economic mobility don't just go up, they go down too.
Can we look to countries like Germany that have healthy vocational and technical training programs?
And why would you think that I would want to severely limit social and economic mobility? What are you implying here? I don't get it.
One major problem today is that most bachelor's degrees are required but not sufficient for many not-particularly-socially-upward jobs. So go in debt to still not have mobility.
Of course as a side effect this is reflected in the market, as individuals engaging in things they find virtuous are reflected in the market.
If you don't trust people to make decisions for the community, why not just let them all make decisions for themselves and nobody else? That would solve that problem, no?
For the topic at hand I don't think there's a good way around letting people pick what they want to study among what is available. I deeply believe they should be able to decide what they are going to study for themselves and be given the keys to take informed decisions. Nobody can know better than themselves what is best for them.
You still need to provide a sensible set of available curricula, and people don't individually have the power to decide which curricula should be available so you still need an informed group of people to decide on this, not individually. Obviously you'll probably have to close curricula which don't attract enough people so you'll have some bit of market deciding.
PS: Note how many folks on HN are making fun of Gender Studies course. This is a great signal for any young kid not to enter that course.
Are you indicting the paper or person or other?
K-12 is considered a baseline for society. Everyone is expected to have it. It absolutely makes sense for the government to pay for it.
Post-secondary is a different beast. It is not a baseline for society (Even if it is a baseline for white collar-work). Not everyone is expected to have it. People who end up in, on average, better-paying jobs are the primary beneficiaries of cheap/free post-secondary education.
There are two ways out of this situation.
1. You can make post-secondary the baseline. Everyone could be expected to have it. This... Is probably a good idea for building better citizens (and, by proxy, a better society), but it is not economically cost-optimal.
2. You can keep post-secondary as a special privilege for the a select few, citing that society, as a whole, benefits from educating its most capable members. In that case, you'd need hard admissions testing/filtering/etc, it should be easy to drop out if you can't perform once you've been admitted, and universities should primarily focus on education, rather than being a four-year, three-star resort for middle-class young people.
Neither of these two options would look anything like "College, as it is currently practiced in the United States, but paid for by the government."
Those people also end up paying far more taxes. There's a perfectly selfish reason for government to make college free - it more than pays for itself over the lifetime of the taxpayer.
It doesn't make sense for government to pay for ridiculous university overhead (e.g. expensive new buildings, armies of worthless administrators, wildly overpaid athletic coaches, etc) but it's a no-brainer deal for government to pay fully for the real costs college degree. The key is to avoid paying for the non-education expenses.
If we can make a college degree only cost what it actually costs and not pay for all the cruft why does the government have to start paying it? You've solved the problem at that point.
Only a single payer system has the leverage to force the universities to decouple their cruft from their core educational expenses. And you're right! College tuition would probably be near-negligible if the cruft was removed, but my take at that point is why not just make it free, then?
The irony is we essentially already have this single payer system. Every college and university is dependent on federal financing for tuition. The federal government simply needs to use the power it already possesses. It's a lot like the federal government's refusal to negotiate drug prices, a wasted opportunity.
That's a pretty steadfast assertion. It's untrue, and we know that because higher education used to be affordable without a single payer system.
> The irony is we essentially already have this single payer system.
I'm not sure this is ironic so much as symptomatic. Blank checks lead to waste. Students on the hook for blank checks lead to what we have now.
> why not just make it free, then?
I can think of a couple of reasons. Nothing is free in this world, for one, and beyond that, I don't want to live in a world where I have to spend another 4 years of my life in school just to get a job because it's free and therefore expected of everyone. Those are pretty big reasons why not.
We don't know that it would've been affordable without public financing, but I would wager we'd be in the same boat now but with college entirely out of reach for most, instead of merely expensive.
> Nothing is free in this world, for one
Except college in at least six countries[1]
> I don't want to live in a world where I have to spend another 4 years of my life in school just to get a job because it's free and therefore expected of everyone
You don't have to do this. The world still needs field hands and other unskilled labor, and there are still skilled trades that pay quite well.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08061...
The middle ground is the federal government starts admitting that it is footing the bill for higher education (it already is paying via loans). If the government's only option for recouping the money is via future tax revenue than there should be pressure to keep the cost per student low and expected future earnings high. Hopefully this would result in colleges offering cheap online classes, credit via exams, etc.
Not everybody needs / is fit for long studies so I don't think it should become the baseline. I still think it should be free to avoid preventing people who are but could not otherwise afford it from attending it.
That needs to stop
Likewise, there are loads of things which help society in general which we still hold individuals accountable for. Law-school and Med-school cost loads, but students take on loans for those; small businesses provide a huge portion of employment, but by-and-large the burden of debt (even small-business-advantaged loans) is taken on by owners and not society-at-large (COVID notwithstanding); having a huge selection of television, music, literature, and other media produced in the US is great for society (and is a huge reason for American soft-power worldwide), but the cost of funding nearly all this work is borne by businesses and not the taxpayer.
This isn't to say that certain things shouldn't be funded by the taxpayer. However, saying "This thing is good for all of society, and therefore should be subsidized by the taxpayer" doesn't really necessarily follow.
The burden of these things have exploded in recent years, there's no clear reason why anyone should pay for that immense increase.
In either of the first two cases, someone is paying the exorbitant prices. In my mind, the question is less "Should taxpayers help fund education" and more "Why is the cost of education such a burden to begin with".
Of course, this means you'll still be paying for college, as a taxpayer instead of as an attendee.
Because K-12 is paid for by the government.