@ClarinetDad16 I wouldn’t say it works if it was devalued after becoming free. If all public colleges were free today, there would be an even greater divide in the perception of public colleges v private.
^defending a college system that worked 60+ years ago , is like talking about how good Betamax used to be.
a 19 yr old college student is supposed to know or care about that?
@twoinanddone The traditional American dorm rooms are not common at all in other countries where college is significantly cheaper. They generally think it’s kinda weird.
The devaluation of the reputation of the CUNY colleges had nothing to do with pricing. It was when they moved to open enrollment.
Just to correct the record.
Carry on. And Baruch, Hunter and Macauley have excellent reputations in the region.
Someone has to pay the professors’ and administrators’ salaries, the maintenance staff, the construction and maintenance of buildings, the libraries and computer systems, etc. etc. In countries where students don’t pay tuition, taxes are a lot higher than in the US. They are higher for everybody, even workers with below-average incomes.
When compared to rural people buying lottery tickets voluntarily and subsidizing state-funded scholarships, the - for example - German system seems a lot less fair because two-thirds of the population support by tax mandate one-third of a college-track population. However, even the students who finish college-track high schools and start university are not guaranteed to graduate. Even with early tracking (sometimes as early as 4th grade) the college drop-out rate is at least as high as in the US.
In Florida, the Bright Futures program is a wonderful program with three levels of awards, one at a career/tech level (30 community service hours) and two at a state college or university level (75 or 100 volunteer hours). Club activities before school or during lunch are usually counted and those 75 or 100 hours can be reached during four years of high school. Every community service hour after 8th grade counts toward Bright Futures. On top of that, community colleges, or state colleges as they have been renamed recently, do their own fundraising and are very generous with additional grants to students.
The question remains if someone who needs YEARS of remedial English and math really belongs in a college or would be better of at a vocational school or in an apprenticeship. In Florida, remedial classes are not covered by Bright Futures.
Tradition dorms may not be typical in other countires, but they are becoming less so here too. Kids want to live in suites, or their own rooms and maybe a shared bath. That drives up the cost. My daughter is in a low cost of living area, and the dorms and meal plans are very expensive, but she thinks she deserves a single in a suite, or her own room off campus, and a car to commute. Well, she’s not getting the car and that limits her choices. Living in the shared room is her absolute last resort.
I think if most states offered a free education at the nearest college, with no room and board and perhaps a work requirement, most students would prefer not to take that option. As it is now, most student could go to a school close to home for a lot less, but look how many on CC don’t even consider their local colleges. Now, they want to go out of state or to a small LAC,or to a huge sports school, and are willing to pay.
IF free tuition becomes a reality, I’d want it restricted to the closest school or a state school with rules set up by the state. Take that free offer or go to a school you pay for. I really don’t think there would bedrastic differences in enrollment.
The question, of course, is whether education is a public good or a private good. If the primary positive outcome of education is to let an individual get skills/knowledge to help that individual improve their own life, it’s a private good and should be paid for by that individual (or those directly standing to gain by that individual’s self-improvement). If the primary positive outcome of education is to increase the general level of education of the population to improve everyone’s lives, it’s a public good and it makes sense for at least a large portion of the cost to be spread across the population as a whole.
College education used to be widely seen as a public good; it’s generally (in the United States) seen as a private good nowadays. Which view you think is more correct is directly tied to the degree to which you feel that college education should be free (or at least very deeply discounted) or not.
A huge reason why I admire the effort of Bright Futures and Zell Miller was because it offered a substantial scholarship for middle class families that is hard to find anywhere else on a state level. The scholarships were meant to focus on the merits of the kid, not just their income. I understand concern of sin taxes being regressive and that some kids getting these scholarships “may not need them” but fafsa EFC has long been found to be insufficient of the realities of families and what they can actually pay for college, especially middle class families. People got hit hard across the board with the Great Recession and many people lost job security and assets that would have helped to pay for their kid’s tuition. While low income students may struggle to fully pay all costs for college asides from tuition, the opportunities for funding is a plethora compared to that available for middle class. Besides California that has been rolling out middle class grants, at least from what I can tell and people can chime in to correct me, such opportunities for grants is rare or nonexistant elsewhere. This is especially true in Colorado where anyone with family income making over $50,000 is not considered for any state or very little institutional aid when most in-state schools cost over $30,000 on tuition, fees, books, and R&B alone…what Georgia and Florida created were programs that at least gave a chance for all classes to get their students to go to school without worrying about tuition costs, regardless if they could pay or not. Even though taxes on lottery can be argued that it hurts the poor, there is huge difference between levying mandatory taxes vs. volunteering to play lottery and pay the tax then. My mother LOVES playing the lottery and does not care about the odds. She likes to live with hope of winning big and no matter what I tell her she is happy to play at will and just pay more in taxes. I won’t stop her but I would be more than peeved if the feds think levying more taxes in order for everyone to go to college is the solution. Not everyone is meant for college and I don’t want to be forced to fund anymore expensive new initiatives that don’t address the root of the college cost problem: unsustainable and artificial demand for college that made costs growth become exacerbated.
Is Zell Miller or Bright Futures perfect? No. But they are a huge step in the right direction vs the fool’s gold solution of giving everyone willy nilly free college.
The Zell Miller scholarships are positive in every way. They encourage students to do better so they can get a scholarship. They don’t discriminate by school type, and are available to everyone in the state. They are even paid for by the voluntary lottery. What could be more fair? The problem with the argument that only poor people should receive assistance is that the government has already taxed away funds that families could use to save for college. If tax rates were lower, middle income families could finance college on their own.
Free college is also based upon the premise that college education will substantially improve the economic of people taking it. That might be the case for upper tier colleges and for specific majors, but what happens if we graduate twice as many english majors from low range colleges? Do they have any real expectation of employment after that? Today most of them work in restaurants. It would also exacerbate the shortage of skilled trades workers who are paid far more too. And won’t costs continue to rise with more demand?
Students will just be trading loans for higher taxes and will end up paying a lot more to support an additional government bureaucracy. Besides, how can the USA afford another huge entitlement with $20 trillion in debt?
Using other countries like Europe and Canada as models has lots of problems . All of those countries have substantially higher tax rates than the US. None of them pay fully for their own defense. And almost all of them are rapidly increasing their prices - look at the UK as the canary.
I live in a country with free universities. There are drawbacks, but they are few - most of the problems could be fixed without resorting to financial incentives.
Social-political drawback: do low income families support high SES students with their taxes?
Not true - even in a high taxation country like mine, low income families pay no income tax at all, middle income families pay very little. After deducting the social security contributions, there is no simply no tax base left. So universities are financed mostly be those high SES families who profit most. Of course, you could just as well bill families directly and offer financial aid the way US colleges do, but isn’t having financial aid offices for every single one of the thousands of colleges in the nation a huge waste of money? You could make it a graduate tax to be paid by the student as soon as they are in the work force, or bill via the tax system for every child in school.
Academic drawback: students have no skin in the game and do not work as hard.
That one was true as long as there were no restrictions on the duration of studies, you could take as many years as you wanted because no one cared whether you actually went to class or took exams. The solution was easy peasy, now that you have to remain in good academic standing and pass a required number of classes or finals or you’re out - and if you qualify for federal grants, you lose them. I think those restrictions could be tightened quite a bit, but at least they are in place now, and now ones stopping universities from tightening them further.
In the current US system, many students have no skin in the game either - their parents do, and they are the wrong people! That is why I like the idea of a graduate tax, or tuition fees to be paid after the fact as a percentage of income. That would give universities skin in the game as well.
Socio-political drawback: children must be tracked by fourth grade in order to keep enrolment down.
Some countries with free unis track, others don’t. It’s irrelevant - what these countries tend to have in common is a transparent admissions process which depends entirely on school leaving exams at age 18. If unis are at capacity, some over enrol, others cap student numbers and admit according to GPA. You can control admissions entirely using non financial criteria, and frankly isn’t that desirable?
Financial drawbacks: yes, public universities in many European countries are woefully underfunded. however, it does tend to make those institutions focus on their academic mission. In the thread on why US students are purportedly “flocking” to Germany, posters like @dfbdfb and @fractalmstr have said things like “those universities are only for learning” and “you get an education, but not much else”. Could be a criticism, could be a compliment. From a European perspective, US colleges sell an experience rather than an education, they’re in the leisure business, the housing business, the catering business, the sports business. In order to get an education beyond community college level, you MUST buy the whole experience, and it appears that it is often overpriced. I should like to move more private money into the public education sector, but the question remains how to avoid that money flowing into non-academic bloat rather than into improving the student experience beyond lifestyle amenities.
Cultural drawbacks: There is a cultural shift that happens when things in life are free. They do lose their worth in many peoples eyes. That is one reason I do not support completely free universities, even in european countries where people are used receiving high quality public services “for free” (at the point of delivery anyway, but in a country like the US it might be a cultural desaster, with public institutions losing a high amount of ground to private ones.
Because there are restrictions on who’s allowed to attend that “free” university!
In France and Germany, if you don’t make the cut in high school, you don’t get to attend university, period. I had a friend in France who screwed up in high school (and thus was ineligible for college), but whose family had enough money that he was able to re-do his final year of high school in a private school. I doubt such an option exists for most families.
In Scandinavia, post-secondary education includes the “folk high school,” a form of community college. Most of these schools have a particular focus, often (but not always) vocational, and they provide an option for students who are unable to gain admission to one of their country’s universities.
There’s also traditionally been a difference in expectations between European countries and the U.S. In Sweden, for centuries, if your father was a baker, it was expected that you’d be a baker also. In the U.S., it was understood that if you worked hard enough, you could achieve anything, regardless of where you came from or what your parents did. These days, unfortunately, the “hard work” piece of that equation seems to have been dropped . . . and the shorthand seems to be that if you want anything, you can have it, whether you work hard or not.
I don’t know about the Florida program. But IMO GA Hope program offer options for a large group of people. From the high achievers who are most likely Georgia Tech or UGA bound, they have Zell. For the average student 3.0 or better, they have hope. If your child has a below a 3.0 they offer the Hope grant. If a child is struggling to maintain a 3.0 then they may not be ready for the rigor of a 4-year university. They would be better served at a community college or technical college before attending a 4-year university.
I don’t think it’s a problem of Hope not benefiting low-income students. I think the problem is they are not taking advantage of the options they have. Not everyone will be able to start at a 4-year university. Also, before you get a child off to college you have to 1st get them out of high school. The low HS graduation rates among low-income students may be the reason so few go on to use Hope benefits.
Let’s not forget the UCs and Cal States were once free or next to nothing and did fine, both in terms of desirability and quality. (They weren’t all equal, but I doubt anyone could find fault with UCLA or UCB.) But those economic times are in the past.
California is also close to bankruptcy and has some of the highest taxes in the country.
The issue going forward is making a system that is sustainable in the long term that minimizes waste. The current system of pell grants and loans from the federal government has pumped the system with easy money. The bureaucrats in Washington with their starry eyed intentions thought that giving loans and grants to anyone who wanted education would make it affordable, especially to lower and middle class students. Instead they created a perverse incentive for colleges to capture these subsidies which jacked up prices (in Colorado the years after the GR in 2009 instate schools were raising tuition 9-10% a year). Fed money allows the states to treat in-state student subsidies as fully discretionary when economic woes happen and they’re the first on the chopping block. A shift towards a model where the states emulate Florida and Georgia and create their own programs is a long term solution because sin taxes (specifically lottery taxes) are more resistant to economic downturns and thus keep a local state program operating with the funds needed. We need to focus on helping our best and brightest first and foremost, regardless of class. We put so much effort into how we can make college affordable for certain income groups that we made it unaffordable for everyone!
I don’t buy the argument of “you have to pay money to have ‘skin in the game’” at all. The years spent in school are a significant commitment all on their own, and very few people who would choose to work hard if they’re paying for it would refuse to if they weren’t. 18 year olds are notoriously bad at understanding the concept of debt, so they wouldn’t even care one way or the other.
Some people think of school as a “party center” where you skip class and don’t care if you fail. Those people shouldn’t be going to school anyways, and often they have debt too. We shouldn’t be encouraging those kind of people to go to school, on their own money or on public money.
Plenty of countries have cheap or free college education and the schools aren’t some decrepit and underfunded wrecks. They save hundreds of millions of dollars on not building new dorms that they don’t need and on not hiring more staff on their payroll than would actually be useful for the university’s functions in education and research. It’s the unnecessary expenses that cost the most.
You say “unnecessary expenses”, others say “vital services”.
A bit of a problem, that.
Generally I don’t think of “buying expensive pretty buildings” for the purpose of advertising the school as a necessary expense. Students wouldn’t suffer from living in slightly less fancy dorms or from living at home when they actually live close enough to make it feasible.
The Scandinavian model seems more sane of course, but to work it also has to offer older students a chance to be admitted to university later in life if they don’t go there right out of high school.
The unspoken truth of a “straight inflexible path to success” is that it overwhelmingly favors the wealthy and well connected. To give the poorer (and the less successful at a younger age) a chance, they need to be able to make up the difference in later years.
I have to call BS on the “decrepit” Canadian university claim. Granted, my main experience is with the University of Toronto, but I’ve attended or visited several other Canadian universities. I have never seen anything “decrepit” on any of the campuses. In comparison, I was appalled by the poor conditions that I saw in several of the top ranked California public and private universities we’ve visited within the past couple of years.