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Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

It seems much fairer to universally fund zero or low cost tuition for public university (or trade school, etc) irrespective of wealth and people wanting the prestige or networking or whatever of private university institutions can then pay for that perceived added value.

Instead, we have squabbles over the scraps of funding over current access and the enforcement costs of trying to keep one group from "getting ahead" of another while wealth is being drained from most labor classes - even the upper middle classes where current college aids generally falls away completely.

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This is more or less how things worked where I lived in Italy, but I'm not totally convinced. There's still an 'opportunity cost' to going to college; for that and other reasons, it's still more an institution for middle/upper class kids. So they're taking advantage of a subsidized benefit more than those who aren't so well off, which is a bit perverse.

Also, while I think kids in US schools are treated way too much like paying customers, it seemed that in Italian schools students were seen in some cases as more of a burden to be dealt with.

I don't know what the best answer is. I'd happily take Italy's health care system, because everyone either uses it or has the potential to.

> Also, while I think kids in US schools are treated way too much like paying customers, it seemed that in Italian schools students were seen in some cases as more of a burden to be dealt with.

In America you tend to get both. Administration treats you like a customer (in the sense that they see a wallet with legs when they look at you) while the professors frequently seem to view teaching courses as a chore that gets in the way of their research.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions to go around, but all-in-all it's generally pretty crap.

Name any other industry that gets a detailed map of your finances and savings before issuing a price for their services. It's a recipe for maximal extraction.

The government. I pay more in taxes not because I use more roads, need more protection from our military, or send more kids to the local school. I pay more because the government knows I can afford it. That is how the system was designed and it is completely appropriate in my opinion. College is just a continuation of that since it is in part funded by the government. Except in recent decades we have shifted the burden from the overall taxpayer to the students themselves (and their parents). However the basic idea that the people who have more money should pay more for the service has stuck around. I can't say I disagree with that approach even if it does incentivize weird loopholes like the one discussed in the article.

I agree with people with more paying more into the general fund of the government. But when major parts of the US budget get deficit funded, why does higher education get individually loaded cost wise? It makes no sense, there's no real need to discourage people from getting too much education. And long term loans, are just as inflationary to issue to the economy - and when you collect the interest back long term, you're just causing a drag on economic expansion.

I completely agree with you that this approach to education isn't ideal and that we collectively would be better off if the onus for funding education was shifted back to the general tax payer again. That said, if you have a system in which the education dollars are limits, like we currently do, the best approach in my opinion is to charge people based on their ability to pay.

> Name any other industry that gets a detailed map of your finances and savings before issuing a price for their services.

But, higher ed doesn't. They set a price in advance, and get that information if/when you ask for a public subsidy (which the university may require you to do and to share the information as a condition of offering their own discounts, framed as self-issued subsidiies.) Pretty much every industry can ask for that kind of information as a condition of offering discounts, though they may not have public subsidies available or be able to get the information used in public subsidy applications directly.

They set an extremely high price in advance and give discounts based on that information. So unless you can afford the fully fund that price out of pocket, you have to come to the table and get gov't help, which then requires the disclosure. And this is across the entire system, so it's not like you can go to a differently behaving entity.

This is just an offshoot of the financial industry though.

I guess that depends on the school. I think professors in 'regular' schools are pretty available to students in the US.

Yes, that's a good point. Different schools have different teaching/research balances and I would expect to find a difference there in the average attitudes of the professors.

I didn't look at college prices in Italy from the US, but in many nations (germany, netherlands), the tuition and the board was not zero but a reasonably low cost where family or even part time work would pay for that (low hundreds of euros per semester). That seems like a far more level playing field than what we're looking at in the US where a majority of students currently face a lifetime debt burden (and that is the best "aid" offered..)

Even if the price is zero, you're spending 3/4/5/whatever years not bringing in money. You could, by way of example, be helping in your dad's auto-repair business and learning that trade. That's the "opportunity cost" I wrote about.

No argument that their system is better in some ways, but I think it has some defects too.

It seems much fairer to universally fund zero or low cost tuition for public university (or trade school, etc)

I like the inclusion of trade school: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio..., as a lot of modern college education is bogus: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz.... I've been on the supplier side of it, and the extent of the corruption in the system is understated.

Still, zero or low cost will create shortages, and that will create fairness or unfairness of a different variety. There is no panacea. We should admire and work towards better vocational education, though, because many people don't like sitting quietly and doing abstract symbol manipulation.

I reject that low cost will create shortages in education, why? The more people we educate, the more are available to educate others. People, ingenuity, and education are a renewable resource.

The biggest problem is cost. We shouldn’t devote a cent more funding to colleges without requiring massive spending and tuition cuts.

Even public colleges resemble country clubs. That’s great, but we shouldn’t tax non-college grads so kids can have a good time.

If college cost the same as it did 30 years ago (adjusted for inflation), there really wouldn’t be an issue.

Additional funding will just lead to more admins, useless programs, and larger tenure salaries.

Its clear that federally backed student loans are one of the causes for increased tuition across the board. It seems that instead of pushing for debt cancellation it would be better to restrict any sort of federal assistance unless you're going to your in-state public school (likely the cheapest option in 99% of cases).

I think federal and state funding should go directly to public universities (with strings on administrative overhead and tuition costs). Federally backed student loans might remain for partial coverage of private university, but otherwise, they do exactly what you say - allow tuition costs to rapidly increase.

But the principle of universal low cost access and bulk financing of it what is the cost saver vs trying to apply consumer product market models where transactions few and in most cases once in a lifetime per consumer. Tuition increases because the consumer product model of giving loans can't regulate prices in the market with that kind of transaction structure.

Edit: Worse, as I mentioned in another comment, it's an industry that gets a detailed map of your finances before issuing a price for the services. That's no kind of market.

Pass a law that ZERO federal or state money can go to private universities. It is not the role of public tax dollars to subsidize wealthy private institutions.

The lion's share seems to just go to administrators, anyways.

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