Why not just free university education for people who have the prerequisite academic qualifications?
How do you really find a good job then? Mostly through family networking. And who has a good family network? The same kids that could afford college regardless. Many college educations are just years wasted, not unlike bad degrees in the US. No matter how many people might think about the wonders of classical educations, and how college taught them to learn, and similar drivel, in practice, those things only matter if you have opportunities handed to you anyway. For people that do not get the opportunities, college is only helpful if it helps them get the opportunities! Whether that's through non-family networking, or because what they studied in college is something in demand in the job market.
When studying the effects of any policy change, we have can't just stop at the first level: We have to see how the rest of the world will react to the primary results to the policy change. It's a bit how student loans didn't really make it that much easier to go to college: What they really did was make all colleges a lot more expensive, making a mistake in major and/or institution that much more dangerous. I think of a friend of mine, Ph.D in Biology with a 6 figure college debt, and no good American jobs that would take her. She's teaching technical english in Japan, because it pays marginally better than her American options! All those years of study, all that money, to go unused, along with being saddled with terrible debt.
So all I am saying is, bad outcomes can happen in a whole lot of cases. Want better outcomes? Create more jobs.
* Simply attending a 4-year university has costs beyond tuition and books; there are plenty of people who don't go to college because they can't afford 4 years out of the workforce.
* The 4-year university system is extremely brittle, in that it creates good outcomes primarily for people who are in the right place (somewhere they can easily attend a good university) at the right time (right after they graduate high school) --- do anything to get off the college track during your high school years and it becomes extremely hard to re-engage with it.
I'm uncomfortable with the idea that a university degree is entirely about workforce skills.
Would our society be better if more citizens were liberally educated and thusly enriched? Perhaps. But that doesn't invalidate the desire to offer students greater opportunities at lower opportunity cost.
Can most of these aspects of a "more well-rounded education" not come from reading, travelling and extra-curricular activities (like music lessons and trips to the theatre)?
But, It's a rational view. The soaring cost of college is what makes it largely an economic proposition for many these days.
Funny, where I come from, going to a school that takes tuition means you're too dumb to graduate from a "real" university. Most notably, most universities don't accept for-profit faculties. This means that you can at most pay for a "4 year degree", but not for a "university degree".
I don't know if it's like that in all of, or even most, Europe. But it's definitely like that in all the countries I've heard about from friends who live there.
Everyone bemoans the increasing in tuition and increase in admin staff.. these things are intimately tied. The cost of education on a per-student basis hasn't increased very much in the US. Most of the cost burden has just shifted from taxpayers to students (for better or worse). Much of the admin staff is necessary to handle all of the financial aid, grant applications, etc.
Simply providing tuition-free education would eliminate much of the bureaucratic overhead.
We didn't have a problem paying for college in the US until everyone decided that the government should help pay for it. Throwing more money at the problem won't fix it; in fact, it's been a huge part of the problem!
I've fought this battle on HN before and nobody wants to believe that college isn't any more expensive than it previously was, so I'll leave this here -- but do a bit of research and you'll be surprised.
Edit;
Since everyone seems to be downvoting this point, here's the inflation-adjusted cost per student in California from 1987 - 2013:
http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12...
It actually costs about $2,500 less per student today than it did in the late 80's -- yet during the same time, tuition has increased by upwards of 5x. That delta used to be carried by taxpayers but has been shifted to tuition.
Where in the world did you get this idea? College if three (3) times more expensive than it was 40 years ago:
> but do a bit of research and you'll be surprised.
Research: http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...
http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12...
Seemingly nobody understands, or wants to understand this point.. College used to be an investment made by the working class in the youth paid for via taxes (state expenditures >> tuition), it's now flipped to an investment made by 18-year olds in their own careers (tuition >> state expenditures) -- Both approaches have their own merits, but focusing on cutting the cost of education misses the forest for the trees when those costs haven't increased over time.
So it looks like the cost of college is yet another burden the boomers have placed on our doorstep (and even more, the doorstep of those younger than me). I'm skeptical that saddling 18-year-olds with mounds of irrevocable debt has any merits to speak of, but am curious what argument could be made in that direction.
I don't buy that line of thinking at all, but some surely do.
When my daughter was attending a private university, she had an enlightening conversation with a professor who worked on pricing for her university. He told her their prices were not going up in response to increased costs, but rather to maintain a certain price relative to in-state tuition. Of course, in-state tuition has been steadily increasing because it is becoming less subsidized.
In other words, the cost increases are a response to cutting government funding, both for private and public.
Could you clarify this statement? It seems like you could be saying the state universities are a relatively recent phenomena. If so, could you give a few examples? I suppose Alaska and Hawaii, being the newest states, have the newest "state" university system, but even the University of Alaska predates Alaska becoming a state.
Free? There is no such thing. Someone will always end up paying for it.
There's a very real stipulation that regardless of whether an individual actually attends a university or not they will be having the monetary products of their labor forcibly taken and used to pay the professors, construct the facilities, and heat the buildings.
You can divert that "free" money and have "free" things for the middle class. That the wealthy would then be "paying" for it is a philosophical perspective that presupposes the status quo for wealth distribution is somehow "correct"
Bad filters look for weaknesses and good filters look for strengths. Anyone who excels in at least one area has potential to do great things.