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- It keeps them from needing to be supported by my tax dollars for their entire lives; and</p>
<p>2) They will pay far more in taxes than the education cost, making it a good investment.</p>
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<p>It’s true that lower state support is one factor in the change in tuition, but since the taxes that were supporting the state school amounted to de facto tuition (paid by tax-payers instead of students), it doesn’t mean that college actually costs more than it did before. It just means that the cost is being borne more by the actual beneficiaries (students) instead of strangers who have nothing to do with my education (tax-payers). I know this isn’t what you were talking about but I’m making this point so I can make the following:</p>
<p>whether you give more money to schools by using students as a middle man (by giving them non-market loans and such) or whether you give it to them directly from the state treasury, in both instances the schools have the incentive to spend as much money as they can bring in. In the past thirty years or so this has taken the form of piling on layers of administrators and special programs that have little to do with classes, labs, etc.</p>
<p>Although my preference is to separate the government from higher education, given a choice between how things are now and how things used to be (with more state funding) I’d prefer how they used to be–and it’s entirely because states can’t deficit-spend indefinitely so schools have an upper ceiling that curbs the growth of administrative excess. But bring federal money into the equation and schools have a much higher ceiling. In principle, it’s limited only by the amount of money Congress is willing to spend on “loans” to students.</p>
<p>But I don’t see us returning to that, given how federally-imposed entitlement spending continues to dominate state budgets.</p>
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<p>The argument is the same in that a more skilled workforce creates a larger overall economy, which benefits everyone, including benefiting the wealthy to a greater extent than the taxes they paid, because the more skilled workforce has more money to buy whatever goods and services the wealthy (or companies / investments that they own) sell to make money.</p>
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<p>Pell grant = $5,550 per year
Stafford loan = $5,500 to $7,500 per year</p>
<p>The $11,050 to $13,050 per year of federal grants and loans is not the dominant fraction of the up to $60,000 per year cost of many private universities.</p>
<p>I’d personally rather tuition at state schools be completely free but that’s just my silly mind that thinks the government should actually support it’s people and not be bought by those with the money to **** us all over…</p>
<p>“However, once you get into occupational training, it is hard to make a credible argument for why strangers should pay for the economic betterment of another person.”</p>
<p>So, it’s better for strangers to only pay for people who probably won’t get a successful career? It seems VERY spiteful to not want to give other citizens of your country the opportunity to be financially successful. Don’t give people a chance to pay it on down to the next generation by means of taxes on their success. Instead, let’s only give out liberal arts degrees to people who will probably never be in a good enough position in life to be able to help the next generation of innovators. Let’s double penalize success by attaching a tuition premium based on ESTIMATED success, then heavily tax the actual success IF achieved.</p>
<p>This kind of mentality will kill this country over time. And you ARE silly to think it’s the government’s job to support everyone financially.</p>
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<p>1) is nothing more than a blackmail argument, really, and 2) is the broken window fallacy.</p>
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<p>But you’re missing the point: who is benefiting without paying?</p>
<p>I don’t really want to lecture everybody on the economics of private goods vs. public goods, but unless everybody has a basic grounding in economics, this is a pretty asymmetric conversation, so I think I’ll stop talking about the desirability of government funding for occupational training. I suggest everybody do some reading on this from credible economists before forming opinions. What sounds good isn’t always the same as what is good.</p>
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<p>We were talking about public, state-funded universities, but the higher education bubble has many sources and is expressed in different ways.</p>
<p>As for private schools, one point to make here is about the moral hazard going on. Just like during the housing bubble, it is the <em>expectation</em> that the government will bail out any defaulter debt-holder which removes the incentive for creditors to be more careful about who they loan money to. As of now, virtually nobody is turned down for even private student loans because the government has been shelling out more and more money and has been buying up more and more loans.</p>
<p>So even private lenders see this as a way of making money, not by getting payments on student debt from graduates in the future, but in hopes of lending out money and selling the debt to the government–or waiting for the government to bail out the graduates–when things go south.</p>
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<p>So you think the government should support the people? Okay. I think the government should secure rights, not give us stuff.</p>
<p>Perhaps you think the government should also buy everybody a car, a house, three meals a day, etc. Where does it stop?</p>
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I disagree. He is equating tax expenditures with correlated tax revenues. While he may be incorrect as to the payoff, it is still an investment, nothing more. For it to be a broken window the either the payoff or the payout would need to be indirect, and he is discussing only the direct costs and revenues.</p>
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<p>I don’t know exactly what your point is but my belief is this: colleges and universities should all be privately owned and operated, the states should divest all their interest and holdings in those areas. Like any other institution in society they should stand on their own two feet and not be artificially propped up with the tax-dollars of people who don’t necessarily reap any benefit from it. The government should not extend loans to people to buy anything, including a college degree, and it should not buy debt or bail out people who gambled and lost. We are adults and should face the consequences of our actions, and we should provide for ourselves, not expect other people to do it for us.</p>
<p>Colleges and universities should be free to charge whatever they want. If I don’t like one college’s price, I’ll go to another. Nobody <em>owes</em> me any kind of job training. If I want a better job than the one I have, it’s my responsibility to get the skills and credentials I need for it. If my family wants to help me, or if a lender thinks I would make a good lendee and is willing to finance my education in the present for payment in the future, then fine. I imagine low market demand for poets would force would-be poets to study poetry the old-fashioned way, WITH A LIBRARY CARD, and the higher market demand for accountants, engineers, and nurses would make student loans in those areas easier to get (for those who can demonstrate ability).</p>
<p>Some things are inherently more expensive to teach and it is reasonable and to be expected that those things would be more expensive for a student to learn, but let the forces of supply and demand work that out, not governments.</p>
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<p>I don’t know what I said that gave you that impression, but I don’t believe that.</p>
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<p>Well, he is saying that it is good for tax-payers to incur a loss that they otherwise wouldn’t (higher taxes) in order for the government to experience a gain in the form of higher tax revenues. In this case the loss is not a broken window but a hit to their bank accounts, and the glazier’s paycheck is instead the occupational training provided to some student.</p>
<p>Thing is, if it makes business sense for somebody to invest in an education now to reap a bigger payoff later, why wouldn’t a bank or other private lender do that? Why would they leave money on the table? It’s much more likely that lenders would already loan money to credit-worthy students, and that the government will wind up extending credit to students for whom it doesn’t make economic sense to provide an education, i.e. the basket weavers and poetry majors.</p>
<p>Anyway, if things worked as he said, then the government has solved its revenue problems once and for all: simply spend money on occupational training and let the big bucks roll in. The track record of governments making investments in the private sector should give him something to think about.</p>
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If taxes are flowing into a fund that then invests in something (education, in this case) which pays a profit, then there is no fallacy such as you suggest. That money can be used to either pay back (potentially with a profit!) through tax rate reductions, or can be used to fund other services. Regardless, this is a separate political issue, the investment remains an investment.</p>
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There are a number of private companies offering private student loans, and to the best of my knowledge they care about major no more than the government does. The issue is that while the government issues loans without regard to much of anything, the private companies (as they would continue to do) issue loans based not on the student’s ability to repay (as this is largely unknown) but on the guarantor’s (i.e. parents) ability to repay… meaning those from poor or low-income families better have another plan. Shifting student loans from public to private serves to make college more expensive for the rich and unattainable for the poor.</p>
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Actually, worldwide, I believe government investment in education has paid off so well that when the topic comes up on the global stage we are considered the backwater hicks for the way we operate. We have had federal loans for more than half a century, and while some tweaking may be in order, I see no evidence that the system has not greatly improved us socially and economically.</p>
<p>The economy is not a zero-sum game. The broken window fallacy doesn’t apply to everything.</p>
<p>Many college degrees are not really occupational in nature, yet can ultimately lead to careers that make a lot of money. For example, I know a guy who started a company, employed a lot of people, and cashed it out. Serious wealth creation. He is a physics major, the company he started had absolutely nothing to do with physics. Without some kind of college degree though, it is much harder to open those doors. Lots of English or philosophy majors go on to law school. Etc.</p>
<p>There is also a social aspect - even if it costs me some money in higher taxes, the increase in the living standard and wealth accumulation is so high for people with college degrees vs. not, and they use so much less in gov’t assistance, that I am willing to pay something to give these people a leg up. Not everything is about the money in my pocket.</p>
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<p>I would rather pay taxes to educate the talented children of poor families so that they gain the skills to become economically productive taxpaying citizens, rather than see them waste their talent and end up in marginal subsistence jobs that contribute very little taxes and produce very little spending on things that my job depends on people buying, or (worse) become a welfare drain for the rest of their lives, or (even worse) go into criminal activity, becoming an even bigger drain by requiring increased spending on police, courts, jails, prisons, private security, etc…</p>
<p>I mean if you’re thinking from the school’s pov then yes; higher cost & they’re giving more value to the students. But you have to think of it big picture - it’d basically mean less people would be going into engineering etc. and we don’t want any less of those; they’re the ones that drive society forward.</p>
<p>I was suspended in my freshmen year for taking tests from my teacher, this was my first offense. But the other kid who did it with me it was his second offense. How will this affect our acceptances into colleges</p>
<p>absolutely they should.
and btw ,why Doctors make more than Engineers? what do they provide more than engineers?</p>
<p>Should be a supply demand model in reality. The more people who want a major, the more it should cost. That would solve lots of problems; it’s basic economics.</p>
<p>I think the real issue in getting tuition down is cutting the bloat. There are sooooo many layers of administration now on campuses it borders on ridiculous. With the advent of computers and other efficiency machines, how is it we have to have so many more people on staff to manage similar class sizes? I know a few professors (grad school level) and it’s interesting to talk with them about the amount of $$ getting gobbled up administratively while they have to continually beg, borrow and … to maintain funding levels for their departments. </p>
<p>As to the theory that education at state colleges should be free for everyone, I just don’t get it. Kids today that are “being buried in debt” with lax student loan requirements are taking 5, 6, or even more years to graduate with degrees that are marginal at best. There’s no accountability or responsibility for them to get in, get the education and get out. They’re so busy “finding themselves” that they end up shackling themselves with debt and then they want the rest of us to help them pay their way out of it? Have a friends son who got a full ride to Vassar, “found himself” exploring all that the college offered and he ended up getting kicked out/arrested. If the student has no skin in the game or a ongoing pain point of getting something, they won’t value it. The people I knew who worked during school (work study, etc) and paid for at least a noticeable portion of their tuition did far better than those who didn’t have to work for it. As parents, we’ve done a miserable job being intentional with our kids, helping them through high school to be exposed to different careers they may like to study for. As my friend said last week, “My son has worked so hard in high school, I told him to have fun at college.” I thought, what an awful sendoff. He literally told him go and party and have fun. Glad I’m not paying for that kids tuition…</p>
<p>Sure engineering degrees have a very high ROI but I don’t think that schools should charge more for them. After all, the government keeps cutting back allotted pell grant amounts and charging more for engineering majors may prevent many from obtaining these types of degrees.</p>