Free Public Education anyone? It amazes me how countries like USA and Chile indebt their youth basically for life, specially nowadays that having a degree doesn't even guarantee a decent job anymore.
Out of people who do have debt, the median student debt for someone with a bachelors degree is $25,000. That's less than the average U.S. new car loan. Over a career, a typical college graduate will pay much more in extra taxes in one of those countries with "free public education" than the $25,000 median student debt for college.
Second, the United States has "free public education." The question is do we need to extend that to tertiary education. We sent a man to the moon back when just 5% of adults had a college degree. It's not clear that sending vastly more people to college is actually going to add value.
It's free in the same way a Christmas gift is free; but with giving education we're also guaranteed a return in an improved society with people capable of performing roles we have need of.
Better to give education than to structure society around greed and demanding a profit in return for education?
The difficulty is that you are going to earn a lot less while you are at university, so if you spend 3 years there earning $0, it really drags down lifetime earnings unless the degree adds a somewhat decent %age above baseline in terms of earning power.
You'd have to have a less than 7% earning power increase, and I wouldn't even call that a decent percentage for one year of dedicated self-funded training.
It's not given without charge, because the taxpayer was charged. If my friend buys my lunch because I left my wallet at home, or it was more expensive than I thought, I don't say "oh wow, free lunch!" I acknowledge that the lunch was paid for by someone else. I certainly wouldn't go around telling people I got free lunch that day. That's a surefire way to make sure nobody helps me out again.
Can we stop pretending this point is insightful? Nobody thinks a free lunch is truly free.
And because of that, we don't call things "free lunches" (except maybe satirically), which is my point.
We have that, it is called K-12 Education. Which should be more than enough schooling for people to be successful in the workforce.
We has a society devote about $300,000 to $500,000 per child to educate them through high school, if this education is so poor that we then have to devote another $200-$300K to send them on to 4 years of additional schooling before they can function in society. Well something is seriously wrong with K-12 Education and we need to reform that, not further burden the tax payer with free university for all