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Comment by fwipsy | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the value of studying arts, social sciences, etc. But why should taxpayers cover that? There are lots of online courses which could provide the same education for free. Community colleges also show that it's possible to provide a decent in-person education at a fraction of the cost of major universities. If we could get tuition under control, then federal tuition assistance would be fine, but also hardly necessary. Federal tuition assistance creates a perverse incentive.

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Why should taxpayers pay for jobs training programs? since these vocational students expect to make lots of money with their certificate in hand, they can just take out a loan. this makes an actually rational system where the cost of job training is forced to be commensurate with the economic value of the output after the job program.

OTOH education should obviously be subsidized because it is a public good to have a society where everyone is educated, even though education will have close to zero measurable economic impact on any particular individual, every aspect of society benefits greatly from everyone having access to it.

It's crazy that education has been subverted into vocational training, and now that the transformation is nearly complete people are asking, wait why the hell is there any education going on in these places, aren't they supposed to be job training programs?

The issue IMO is precisely that taxpayers don’t pay, they give out loans. Yes, sometimes those loans are “forgiven”, but only after decades of struggle and distress. And I put forgiven in scare quotes because often the original balance has been paid by then anyway.

Not providing loans for programs that will not provide the means for a student to repay them is the right thing to do, as those loans are a path for the exploitation of the student.

Sure, continue providing free k-12 education. Continue funding community colleges and free online courses. But funding private universities with public money creates a huge misaligned incentive. Universities are incentivized not to provide the best education, but the best experience so that they can attract more students and more public money. This can be actually detrimental to education - e.g. grade inflation because universities are unwilling to delay graduation for underperforming students, which reduces the rigor of education for high performers.

Could also reverse it: Why should tax payers cover things that pay off anyway.

Individuals may rationally avoid the downside risk of a college degree, even if the expected value is positive. As a toy example, suppose college costs $200k and increases lifetime earnings by $2m 90% of the time, or by $0 10% of the time. As a high school grad, I'm not sure I would take those odds; $200k of debt could ruin my life. But the government may prefer that everyone take this gamble, because most individuals will benefit and also it will pay for itself in increased tax revenue, etc.

I'm not sure how well this maps to reality, and maybe you're right-- maybe the government should only offer loans, and only to students who have a high probability of paying them off. But I still feel that this is a step in the right direction.

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