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Comment by Upvoter33 | Hacker News Reader

Not all colleges are the same. For example, at the UW-Madison, over half the students leave with do debt at all. There is a Bucky tuition promise so that any low-income person will have college paid for in entirety.

All of the negative comments on here treat "college" as if it is one unified thing, when in fact the experiences across institutions (both educationally, as well as financially) are quite different.

All of that said, to those who say "free college": try telling that to a person in the middle of the state, who has never been to Madison, has never had a kid go to Madison, and who has to pay their tax dollars to support the University. It is a hard sell. Sure, it'd be great if people were willing to support colleges so that they were free. But the taxpayers, by and large, aren't.

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It's very interesting how the world comes rotating,

In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.

Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.

Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.

For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).

Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.

> try telling that to a person in the middle of the state, who has never been to Madison, has never had a kid go to Madison, and who has to pay their tax dollars to support the University. It is a hard sell.

Everyone wins some and loses some with government spending. But overall as a collective group, the idea is that the group is better off (e.g. a more educated population produces greater amounts of valuable work which raises the standard of living for everyone, etc.).

Rural regions get their fair share of wins.

E.g., the massive amount of money that is redirected from productive cities into relatively unproductive rural counties, many of which subsist on jobs that would not exist without superfluous military bases, over-incarceration, massive farm subsidies, or, yes, branch campuses of state university systems. This happens at the state level too. Many of our state’s rural school districts are almost entirely funded by redistributed taxes. Because their local populations won’t even pass no-tax-increase no-debt-load-increase bond issues to fix roofs.

Hopefully work from home will take off and rural communities/states will find a way to become more productive.

A fair share of wins seems to describe the elite coastal cities as well.

Essential workers are not the people running Facebook to sell likes, it's the people picking and moving food to you.

Up to you if you'd like to consider that food a win for them and not you.

Even if there are multiple ways to avoid crazy student debt, the existence of crazy student on a society-wide basis produces social and financial distortions that everyone should be worried about.

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