How should higher education be financed?
thediff.co
thediff.co
a) If the education is free, there's no need to determine _prices_ for different programs, is there? There is a need to decide how many places to offer in each programme, but this is an easier problem.
b) Particular people may decide for themselves without a prohibitive cost factor, thank you very much.
c) When has this ever been a problem? If we want to allocate close to zero to begin with, it is another problem.
In other words, free education for all is basically alright. It is hard to attract the best educational talent in this setting because salaries are usually capped and one can always make more in the private sector, but a combination of job security and high prestige is usually enough to have decent staff.
"Non-capped" salaries usually mean low median salary and very high salary for a few people with 'star' status for whom strings get pulled. And - that status, even in academia, is rarely due to stellar intellectual achievements. Rather, all sorts of fashionable business-related gurus expect to rake in large amounts of cash.
A unionized academic faculty in universities, and a not-corrupt-and-bought union, allow for decent faculty salary. Add the benefit of relative autonomy in choosing one's research directions, and a tenure track that one actually has a chance of getting into, and it's an extremely attractive proposition.
If you're talking about universities here, the job security is really bad. Until you get tenured that is, but most people doing teaching at universities will never get one.
Also most university staff is there foremost to do research, but with some teaching strings attached.
I'd say most people in academia aren't in it for the money, and there are a lot easier/safer ways to get money if that's what you want. A part of it may be prestige, but more important are interest in the work and quite a bit of freedom to do what you want and how. And belonging into a community in deeper way than "just doing my job".
I literally spat out my coffee reading that. Have you even been near a university in the past decade? They are filled with miserable, neurotic, anxious, demoralised husks of people who once thought they could make a difference in the world. "Academics" are broken people in a broken system, labouring under zero-hour contracts, callous, toxic management and clueless deans and chancellors who are at least two generations out of step with reality. The university system has effectively destroyed higher education. There is nothing of value left there, least of all security or prestige.
It is a tragedy that the system produces much more people who really want to be in the system than what it can reasonably employ at the moment, but as for retaining enough good teachers to give a decent education to students, it works both in countries where education is expensive (US, UK) and where it is essentially free (Germany, Israel).
If you want to bring in funding, have phd students, and publish a lot of papers it’s a lot of work, and in a lot of fields PhDs are massively overproduced, and you’ll suffer through endless postdocs.
On the other hand, this is one of the only places you can get paid to do pure maths, and you can choose what you work on, and you get called professor, and you can’t be fired, and you’re surrounded by 19 year old girls? Good luck finding those employment conditions anywhere else!
Sure, if those are your priorities.
All great, until you grow up, get married, have children, reach your intellectual prime and realise that you should probably contribute something real to the world.
That's when the cloisters of "academia" start looking like prison bars. You realise you're surrounded by institutionalised infantilism, involuted bureaucracy, and frighteningly insecure people. Being a "professor" relishing power over 19 yo girls isn't what a mature life is about.
But hey, it's not just academia. I know many from the military and other services who hit their mid 30s and quit, not through lack of career advancement, or money, or through physical fatigue, but because they were surrounded by man-childs and stuck in a classist, sexist, self-serving culture akin to a boys boarding school.
Institutions profoundly arrest self-development and I think they attract people who are in a sense "stuck in life" but lack the courage to assert their real, full potential.
Anyway, we keep selling "university" as some Hogwarts themed funfair ride to young people who can't afford it. That's why I got out. It's so awfully unethical. I'd rather build pedagogical and research relations with grown-ups who I can treat as equals and who have some skin in the game.
"Equality of opportunity" becomes even worse a bad joke when a prerequisite for higher education is to be born to well-off parents.
and you're paying for a service that's free to all. it's a principle. whether or not you use it doesn't matter, that would be selfish.
2. Even regarding income tax - in most world states, tax is not flat, and most workers pay little income tax anyway (sometimes even 0, if there's a threshold for non-zero tax rate, or tax credits for various social situations etc.)
So not regressive. Also, like other commenters mention - if you don't attend university, your children, or other relatives and friends, might be. Plus, we all need the higher education system to function, for modern society to function, so it makes sense that we contribute to it through some mechanism.
But beyond that, there is a deeply flawed logic behind indicating the tax would be "regressive" just because you personally don't benefit from it. So long the taxes are reasonably efficiently allocated (by macroeconomic standards, not by business standards) and increase a societies overall well-being, the vast majority of people benefit from it, either directly or by proxy.
There are debates to be had which kind of "services" benefit from this scheme of financing the most, but being from a country where higher education is publicly funded and having benefited from this accessibility of higher-ed as well, I can see the merits of this scheme in the context of higher-education.
You’re investing in society, with an expected payout in the future (via retirement benefits).
What’s crazy to me is we have a whole generation who failed to pay for maintaining the machine — but who expect to be paid out anyway.
Seems like a worthwhile investment.
Don't want to offer your degrees to anybody who is willing to pay the price and can pass your tests? Then you are welcome to decline all government funding including student loans.
What a horrible take on the topic at hand.
1. Pay what price? If it's free, then it won't matter. 2. Standardized tests aren't currently pass/fail. 3. Student selection isn't based on tests alone.
Under this proposal, why even bother having more than one public post-secondary institution?
Now that we only have one publicly-free college, the value of degrees from all of the schools that are fine eschewing government funding are going to skyrocket since graduating public college will be the equivalent of passing high school (in the US).
All quality students would flock to those private institutions and be content paying tuition knowing what a huge advantage they'll have in the workforce.
It created ultra expensive education as Universities do not have to constantly evaluate the quality/price relationship as everybody else needs to. They just raise their prices and people pay(because they do not know how much effort it will take to pay it back).
It looks good on paper until the bubble pops. The same happens with Real State.
Even if we decide the only relevant criterium is the free market, people pay for the ability to do these things, and for good reason, just as they pay for the ability to use and develop technologies.
I think it would be a great loss to all of humanity if we suddenly stopped paying for social science education. In a nutshell, and a bit polemic: What do you want humanity to be, a great many cogs in a science machine churning away without looking sideways? I would not want that.
The only degrees where this selection mechanism seems to have inverse effects are business management related ones.
Some fields have highly competitive admissions, because the number of people willing to study them far exceeds the demand for graduates. This may be because the field promises a well-paying high-status job (e.g. law, medicine) or because it is inherently interesting (e.g. social sciences, biology). In other fields, particularly in STEM, admissions can be easy, because the demand exceeds the number of capable and interested students.
Just because some fields don't (pretend to) have formalized theories, it doesn't mean the study isn't rigorous.
It's nothing but an arbitrary choice that there is an art degree, but not a heavy machinery operation degree, and not the other way around. This is all class based gate keeping, and should never be formalized and funded by tax money.
Seems fairly obvious why three years of sitting in classrooms and libraries isn't seen as a particularly useful way of demonstrating aptitude for operating heavy machinery.
If you want to defund the areas of education that don't provide value, you should favour less government intervention, not more. Let the market fund education by having employers or financiers preferentially fund (through loans, or otherwise as discussed in TFA) the students who are more likely to enrich them later on.
A lot of education doesn't necessarily produce "value" in short term bean counter sense, but are very important to for example retain culture and knowledge.
Also, to apparently great shock of many, there are a lot of people who don't select what to study based on what is "more likely to enrich then later on". Most people don't care much about being rich, and the ones that do are probably quite miserble.