Maybe we should address ways to make college more affordable instead of just throwing money at the problem. Not that common sense is expected from our elected officials, but it would be a nice thing if it happened.
*Every topic that has anything to do with the law is political in theory and, more often than not on big issues, in practice. Politicians make the laws. Clearly if there is going to be free tuition, say for community colleges to start like Tennessee has IIRC, it is going to happen because Congress votes for it and the President OKs it. The trick is to discuss the feasibility and/or the desirability of such a development without getting into either particular politicians or liberal/conservative generalities. That is when the thread will devolve into broad-based nonsense.
So far so good.*
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Margaret Thatcher once said, “sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”
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Yup!
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Maybe we should address ways to make college more affordable instead of just throwing money at the problem. Not that common sense is expected from our elected officials, but it would be a nice thing if it happened. <<
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We can also do everything we can to make people aware of the affordable college options that are already available to them, and to encourage them to take advantage of them. But instead we keep getting threads about people who take on $120K in debt to go OOS for a Nursing degree from “dream school.” As long as students keep doing stuff like that, it is hard to get a grasp on how bad the problem actually is.
Before we do that, perhaps we ought work on graduating high schoolers. The near-50% drop out rate in the inner city high schools is much more of a “public good” (IMO) than whether the upper middle class and 5 per centers can attend a sleep-away college tuition-free.
I can’t agree nor disagree, since I don’t understand.
fwiw; per wiki (the font of all knowledge), education does not count as a public good in the economic sense.
Public good: a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society, either by the government or a private individual or organization.
“a conviction that library informational services are a public good, not a commercial commodity”
It could be excluded by a more technical definition, if you really insist… but so would public projects like roads and bridges which I’m sure most people would be willing to call “public goods.” Beyond that, it’s a semantic difference that doesn’t really matter - we’re not economic pedants here.
People will do that regardless free in-state public schools or not.
Many countries offer high quality free or cheap university tuition to its citizens. But those countries don’t give it to everyone. They limit it to the students who are streamed early on in secondary school. Doing the same in the US will not be socially acceptable.
^ In some cases the university track is begun before secondary school. Where practiced it is socially accepted because that’s the way it has always been, and university (tuition) is expected to be free (but not books or living expenses).
The difference is that most countries don’t have the one-track university model that the US does, in that the Bachelors degree has become the de facto standard for every field, even when it isn’t appropriate. For example, it’s insufficient for academic fields science or math (you can’t really do any useful work with just that), it’s a pointless extension of the education for professional fields like law or medicine (most countries have direct admission from high school into those programs), and it’s in excess of real necessary requirements for less academic trade fields (that’s what trade/vocational school should be for, but those have fallen out of favor in the US).
So it’s not that they don’t get an education because they don’t go to university. They just get tracked into a field that is more consistent with their actual career goals, and university is most consistent with highly academic knowledge. I don’t think that’s really a bad thing.
Grade school tracking is a bigger, and less commonly considered, issue. Many of those other countries are indeed too strict with how inflexible tracking can be and that’s a huge problem. It’s not a necessity to have that kind of tracking though - it’s more tradition than educational value.
College should be more affordable and more accessible, but not free.
The first two years of college in California used to be free if you went to a community college, but the state had to give that up because it couldn’t sustain the expense. Free college is as unrealistic as getting Mexico to pay for a wall to stop illegal immigration.
Community colleges are still relatively inexpensive in many states, including HI. It still costs SOME money for textbooks and classes, but it’s a fraction of the cost of a 4-year college or U, even in-state. People can get certificates, associates degrees, and go into the workforce with good jobs from community college, as paramedics, respiratory therapists, nurses, paralegals and much more.
A lot of the issue with any form of government-paid education is, who exactly will pay for it? The overall annual expense would most likely run into the hundreds of billions, which is a lot of money but perfectly manageable if taxes rise accordingly. Now the real question is, who exactly is footing the bill: the federal, state, or local government? And more importantly, who is going to be willing to make the controversial laws that will raise taxes and make reforms that are going to be a huge headache for everyone involved for many years to come, regardless of the ultimate outcome? Probably no one for a long while.
What tends to happen is that the federal government controls what it can control without much controversy (federal aid and loan interest rates) and the state and local governments each do as they do (there are a lot of them, of different means). The result is a bit of a mess.
Public school is free, and it’s freeness didn’t make me work any less hard.
Where is it that you live that your public school is free? I must live in the wrong place and be doing it wrong.
(and I agree! the quote thing works!)
Except that a LOT of public projects run a “profit”. The NJ Turnpike, for example, or the bridges into San Francisco; the Golden Gate was paid off long ago.
Except it does matter. If the generally accepted definition of “public good” is significantly different than yours, does it not diminish your argument?
btw: perhaps “common good” is a better fit.
Again, that’s one for the economic pedants. How is this in any way actually relevant to the idea itself? It’s just a pointless semantic argument.
The issue here is who will pay for the “free” education. Cooper Union was free until the investment it was founded upon could no longer support the model. The free education at the service academies is funded by taxpayers to the tune of $250K-$400K per cadet/mid. Education has costs. If we agree that more of it should be “free,” we just have to figure out how to pay for that portion we don’t want to charge the student. Taxes anyone? Other suggestions?
I agree. And part of that discussion should include what to do with the reality of what happens when you separate the people paying for college from those with incentives to keep costs in line (students who are not paying anything for it or paying a lot less for it). Look at medical costs.
Estimates for free public college say it would cost 60-80 Billion Dollars a year (former Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders said he could do it with 75 billion if I am not mistaken). I think that is doable with some tax increases and government spending cuts within the bloated bureaucracy. Also, just paying for community college and technical/vocational school and providing debt-free education after that would be even cheaper.