I think Europe has an ISA program for higher ed. They call it "free college" and the ISA kicks in via a progressive tax system. Funny (sad funny) how when it is put into the private sector in America it basically collapses.
VAT and payroll taxes often make up a larger portion of the budget than income taxes. These usually are not progressive.
Poor people don't even pay for their own benefits, how can you say they fund education for the rich? Rich people are net payers and poor people are net benefactors, if some poor people got an education and remained poor then their education got funded by others, if some rich people got an education and remained rich then they just paid slightly less net to the system, their education wasn't funded by the poor.
Under no circumstance do the poor fund the rich in this system. The main group that loses out are high income earners who didn't get a degree, and the main group that benefits are poor people who got a degree.
You're talking about the US and maybe some EU countries, but definitely not all of them. Everyone pays VAT equally regardless whether you're rich or poor. Furthermore, income taxes in most European countries aren't as progressive as in the US.
And even then, net tax payers can all be considered to have paid for their own education, you never see a situation where poor people fund the education of rich people. At worst you can say that median earners fund the education of median earners who failed to leverage their education to get a better job. But it is mostly a wealth transfer from rich tax payers to poor graduates who didn't get lucrative jobs.
Edit: Also at least in Sweden the worker movement lobbied hard to make education as cheap and available as possible. The cheaper and easier it is to get educated the less of a wage premium it becomes to be educated, making for a fairer society. It is a problem if poor students gets tempted to take a low wage job instead of studying just to make money sooner, it is much better for everyone if they don't have to think about that choice, which is why students gets paid to study in Sweden.
But the poor people paying for it don't get the money back. It's going to some other government program, not necessarily to benefit them.
>It is a problem if poor students gets tempted to take a low wage job instead of studying just to make money sooner, it is much better for everyone if they don't have to think about that choice, which is why students gets paid to study in Sweden.
Why is it much better for society? Most people don't seem to end up doing jobs that are related to their field of study. Sure, there are studies that show that people with a college education are better off than those without, but you have a self-selection problem there. People who have the capability to do well in college will already do better than the average.
The more accurate framing is "100% of people pay for 100% of people to have the opportunity to go to college".
A good analogue is insurance: even though 99% of people might never file a claim, it's not 99% subsidizing the 1% the do-- it's 100% paying for protection from financial ruin that 100% receive.
Your framing would apply if there somehow were a group--people with blue eyes, people born in May, whatever--to whom access was limited.
It's not though. If you lack the aptitude then you will not have this opportunity. You will still have to pay for the ones that do go though. Oh, and they're going to be out-earning you in the future too.
>Your framing would apply if there somehow were a group--people with blue eyes, people born in May, whatever--to whom access was limited.
But this is the case though. Just look at college attendance in urban vs rural populations.
There is one crucial piece missing, though: universities’ incentives. At least in Norway where I live, universities are paid the same for many STEM, humanities and social sciences programs. This causes an oversupply of e.g. historians compared to e.g. software developers, as universities are free to ignore labor market realities.
There are plenty of vocational opportunities out there that can provide a high standard of living and also a rewarding career.
It can also be pretty expensive to get set up. You don't get into making serious money until you work for yourself, which frequently involves a six-figure investment in tools and equipment.
I do agree that college as a way to get ahead in life is over-sold in the US in particular. It's not a coincidence that colleges don't track student outcomes past graduation, despite their sales pitch of 'preparing students for the future'.
What a weird statement. I don't know why you put "free" in air quotes, when University education in Europe (or at least in Finland) is actually free. Also, nobody separates kids into vocational vs college-bound schools, kids themselves can choose. And if you later regret going to vocational school, you are welcome to change your mind later. Heck, even if you apply to a really competitive University track and you don't get in, you are free to attend lectures and attain course materials without being officially admitted into the University - this again is free.
Here you can take a year long course to learn the basics to go to university without going to High-School first- a friend of mine did exactly that.
OFC in reality this is much more difficult due to other factors such as work, family and so on and requires a good degree of discipline, but going to university does so too...
we also have the possibility to go to evening school (for free) to get a High-School diploma and join university as a regular student. My Brother-in-law did that. He learned to be a Baker (in Austria and Germany we have a very interesting craftsmanship system where you train on the job that works out pretty well) and wen to university.
In Spain for instance, it isn’t really free (though it’s cheap compared to the US, around 2.8-3k$/y) but you absolutely get what you are paying for.
I know people who where on meetings deciding the country-wide “update” to the curriculum, and the main reason for vetoing new topics was that it displaced outdated topics for which college X had an expert that was “too old to learn new things, but young enough that he had at least a decade before retiring” (their words).
Health care and university education are things that Europe just does systematically more efficient than the US in the sense of cheaply providing high quality to lots of people. Research I'd be open to debate and business it has to be said the US is miles ahead of e.g. Germany (I'm so jealous of California's NDA and employee IP laws)