I think that you're vastly underestimating how much money is needed to provide quality higher education. Trust me, the last thing we need is a race to the bottom when it comes to higher education.
Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US. Now you may argue that students shouldn't be so superficial, but they are, so universities have to deal with that when competing at the national stage.
As for administration, you probably have no idea how complicated it is to keep a university running. Don't like it? Good luck getting faculty to do the daily grunt work. Their plates are overflowing already just trying to get tenure and keep their jobs.
The higher education system definitely has room to improve, but to claim that it's as simple as "cheap facilities and no marketing" is a vast oversimplification in my opinion.
Yes but that isn't actually making education better overall, it just means you're taking in better students. It's a zero sum game. Every college could deck out their dorms like the 4 Seasons Hotels, but it's not actually improving the quality of the education provided. It's still the same set of students, rotated around a bit more between which ones ended up in which schools.
That's the key part - is separating out what costs actually provide a better overall education vs. which costs just are "marketing in disguise" to take the top students from School A and convince them to go to School B.
Look, public universities in other advanced economies like Japan, Germany, and France probably spend just as much as a typical US state university, yet tuition is basically free. We can argue about how to improve education all day, but let's fund it first so our students don't have to worry about their debts for years. How do we fund it? Higher taxes.
Do you have any justification for this? Or should this just be accepted because you said it's not a good idea?
I don't see an argument anywhere in your post saying why not. Other than as a general rule you are against taxes. Does that mean we should eliminate the fire dept and police dept as well because they're funded by taxes? Or is it only services that already exist are grandfathered in and new services shouldn't be created?
I can provide a counterexample: the best higher ed system in the world operates as a free market.
> Other than as a general rule you are against taxes.
And where did you get that from? In the future, make sure to carefully read comments before replying.
To recap:
I said that we should stop arguing about why school is expensive and instead focus on funding it so American college students don't have to carry a debt for the rest of their lives. I then said that the way to pay for their tuition is to increase taxes.
By definition, not all schools attract the top students. We need a range of schools for the range of our society, not schools wasting the money of students actually attending the school competing for students that won't attend.
Schooling, like roads and health care, work better when run by government.
Government paid higher education usually don't care that much about getting top students. They may or may not come. This attitude makes saving on all the extra stuff pretty easy.
Anyway, not all universities can have top students, by definition, so most universities' generous facilities are wasted in an arms race they can't win.
Bullshit.
Relatively recently, the very top students lived in crappy dorms and ate standard issue cafeteria food and worked out in mediocre gyms. None of which mattered. Because they had top rate professors and high academic standards and intelligent peers competing against them. Throwing away money on fancier buildings and food does absolutely nothing to increase the quality of education.
I definitely see the merit in comparing the US to Europe in terms of what has worked. Even as I am cautious, I value societies willing to experiment and progress forward with solutions to problems.
I'm not sure the US system is amenable to the same thing, but I'll bow out at that point and merely listen to what others have to say.
What I do suspect is that the landscape is changing with regards to what jobs need a degree and how easy knowledge is to obtain.