Most US colleges are businesses subsidized by the government that are competing with each other. And US government allows unlimited importation of the customers from abroad. This is what drives the price. What if Macy’s will ask permission to give out visas to anyone who wants to buy a shirt there?
Among other sources, it should be paid for by taxes, that evil word that people seem extremely afraid of. It will pay off in the long run because the added benefit to society of an educated population is more that what it costs to educate them.
Course offerings should be determined by the level of education that the students the school will accept are capable of receiving - admissions should be competitive because not everyone belongs in college, and I think that 4 year graduation rates can reach into the 80-90% range if the unqualified would be excluded. Course programs should be somewhat flexible, but also correspond with a decent degree of faithfulness to predictions of future employability (e.g. as calculated by the BLS).
The other major cost is to renovate and expand the vocational and community college system to give people a solid education and offer them another path into university if they really weren’t good enough before, but became better students a little later in life.
Housing and dining should be allocated by necessity. No other proper way to deal with public goods, and people can always buy groceries if they want better food, or provide their own housing.
Taxes on whom and in what amounts? What approximately is the total cost we are talking here?
Who decides what type of students each school will accept? I expect college presidents will want to establish their own standards (seeking the best/brightest for their own schools). But how will that work?
College readiness breaks pretty much along socioeconomic lines. How will that play with the general population when “rich” kids are seen as going to college and “non-rich” kids are sent to vocational and trade schools?
Presumably higher taxes to pay for renovating and expanding vocational and community college system? Again, who pays and how much?
Who determines “necessity” in terms of housing/dining?
@NeoDymium I understand the merits of education for our society but you have to acknowledge why underemployment is so high (40-50%) and loan defaults (27%+) is rising: too many people going to college for useless degrees that don’t add ROI. So many people go to college in majors that don’t add much in human capital or productivity. Just look below with the top majors of students:
http://college.usatoday.com/2014/10/26/same-as-it-ever-was-top-10-most-popular-college-majors/
Asides from maybe accounting and nursing, the rest are degrees that have glutted the market and is one of the reasons their ROI is so low. My biggest distaste for “free” education is the moral hazard argument. If a good is fully subsidized, a person would overlook the costs for them to use it and thus exploit it for their own gain as much as possible. IF anyone can go and study what they want without worrying about cost, I am scared of students going in and wasting time “finding themselves” and skipping the 4 year degree mark. This logic is no different if parents just write junior a check for everything and don’t put restraints in place. College needs to return to what it was once seen as: a place for specialization in professional subjects. A history or english degree is not that. If you want to study it, fine but do it on your own dime. We should be focusing on kids being educated first in high school before simply shipping them off to college to take remedial classes their first year or two because their school was so *******. Then we can talk about the merits of kids getting specialized and trained to be productive in society on tax payer dime.
Taxes on the working population and on the wealthy. Given the complexity of tax policy, this is a tough thing to do right and I wouldn’t be able to offer a simple answer there.
Admissions should be based on merit and, for state schools but not necessarily private schools, preference for locals and those with low socioeconomic status. As long as the college system overall offers a reasonable chance for students of average talent and above average work ethic to gain admission and graduate, I think this matter can be left to the university administration.
Socioeconomic class advantage is always there and won’t go away no matter how you structure the program. I mentioned this before, and quite simply the only solution is to allow students to go back to university later in life, as the “straight inflexible path” is inherently socioeconomically biased.
Necessity is based on basic human needs… I’m not sure why this would be difficult. Probably going to be less than luxury but it should be reasonable accommodations for people based on acceptable living standards and medical needs.
Atomic, I studied Classics (is there anything more useless than dead languages) and have been gainfully employed, self-supporting, paying taxes, giving to charity, etc. literally from the day I graduated with my BA. I have worked for what Fortune magazine has claimed are some of the most admired corporations in America.
The idea that History is useless whereas Leisure Studies, Sports Management, Travel and Tourism, or a whole host of allegedly useful degrees is absurd. I know scores of kids now in college who will never be able to unlock actual economic productivity via their college degree- you don’t need a BA to sell memberships at the local LA Fitness branch, and yet, that’s where the kids in my neighborhood who emerge from college with these vocational degrees end up.
Better they should study history- learn to write a coherent essay, learn to research; know who Mao or Lenin were. That’s what’s better for our society and economy- an educated citizenry, not a kid with a degree in Event Planning with a boat load of loans.
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Then you would be wrong. Military duty is not for everyone and I sure hope you don’t recommend that people potentially sign themselves up for the next war in hopes of having college paid for. Dual enrollment is so much so a high status/income aspect by availability, funding by school, parental encouragement, etc that it isn’t really useful as a means to minimize cost. Community college is helpful, but the US has a pretty terrible community college system and it still doesn’t make the tail-end of the education cheap.
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I’m not wrong, it is an opinion and unless you can back your opinion up with statistics, its just that as well. For what its worth, I used the three things as EXAMPLES, not the only ways to make college happen. So, joining the military = signing up for the next war? Dual enrollment is too far a reach for many? Community college isn’t good enough? I’m not buying all the excuses. And pretty offended that you think everyone who joins the military is pro-war. My son is pro-education and that’s one of the few ways it could happen for him.
You yourself said “plenty choose not to go to college” and you are right, “choose” is the right word. For some, any obstacle at all is an excuse.
But what about correcting other differences, such differences in cars and trips abroad and such? A rich student attending free school might have the money to get a new car, go on expensive study abroad trips, and other such luxuries. At what point do those things stop being luxuries and become necessities? Why should finances keep students from having those opportunities since it shouldn’t have to be a factor on where and how they attend college?
I agree and I do think this is an issue. While I believe that a lot of the less productive do add to society, people should be pushed towards more productive degrees. I think two things should be done to remedy that:
- Reduce the number of “Do Nothing Studies” degrees, or perhaps eliminate them entirely. Make the oversaturated but useful degrees such as French Lit, Psychology, etc. have caps on admissions. I personally think it’s one of the responsibilities of government to match citizens to job openings, at least in part.
- Make all majors offered in university more versatile. There are a lot of options for what French Lit, or Biology, or Psychology can be used for, and university graduates should get a wider exposure to all of what their major can be used for. This will probably ramp up the difficulty, but given stricter admissions that may just be a good thing.
As an aside, I would say that in the system I am advocating, that university education should ramp up a significant amount in difficulty, by virtue that versatile specialists will need more in-depth training. Like top schools, it should offer a Masters level of understanding of their field to their graduates. Would be fair to increase the length of the program as well. CC degree programs would also ramp up in difficulty to some point between what it is now and what a university BS program is right now. They would also offer a lot of remedial and vocational education for those that need it or aren’t really university material.
Time is a bigger cost than money and of course there would be requirements for reasonable progress in university, reasonable student commitment for subsidized education in the vocational/CC system.
As with many things in life, we should provide the bare necessities to all, have some programs to help those with financial hardships for useful but not absolutely necessary expenses, and accept some degree of wealth inequality. No economic system has ever managed to fully resolve wealth inequality and perhaps it shouldn’t be done.
Part of being an enlisted soldier is the understanding that you may be deployed in active service. I don’t see how you could think this is not the case. Not everyone is or should be willing to go to war and fight and die for their country as a means of obtaining an education.
CCs and dual enrollment help with paying for college, but they aren’t full degree programs. They offer 1-2 years off a university degree. You still have to pay your way for the rest. And DE programs are not only not always available, but also require a certain level of educational proficiency in high school, and tuition costs.
You make it sound like choice is an excuse. That’s not really true - life often does not allow you the luxury of an education if you have to spend many years of your life pursuing it. The benefit of an educated population is passed on to the entire society, so society should help to pay for it.
The labor markets are a lot more complicated than your simplistic “the government should match people with jobs” model implies.
Do you hire for a living? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to predict with ANY accuracy the labor markets? Were you able to predict 5 years ago the global glut of oil and the dramatic drop in price and why that means that so many kids graduating with degrees in oil/petroleum related fields (allegedly “sure fire tickets to an 80K per year job right out of school”) are currently unemployed?
If you are able to do this, quit CC and start engaging in heavy duty options trading and arbitrage. You’ll be a billionaire by 2017.
But if you can’t (and I suspect you can’t) you need to understand how many interrelated and complicated factors go into the job market, particularly the professional/corporate sector you are likely discussing.
Did you predict the civil war in Syria or the unrest in Ukraine- and if so, were you smart enough to figure out the impact those would have on hiring and what would be “hot fields” for the class of 2016?
Didn’t think so. And those “Do nothing Studies degrees”- are you suggesting the kids who majored in Arabic or Eastern European History and languages or Chinese History have WORSE employment prospects than a kid hoping to get an entry level job in engineering at Exxon? If so- you are mistaken.
As a matter of fact, yes. If you follow enough international politics, you would know that Ukraine is a major gas transit route, that it’s had an unstable government for decades, and that Crimea was going to be a geopolitical issue at some point after 1991. Similarly, Syria has been a flashpoint waiting to happen for decades with an unstable government and its strategic location. Can you predict that they would happen here and now? No. Some time within the 10 year span of 2006 to 2026? Easily. Studying and/or following international politics helps.
Thinking about “hot fields” is short-sighted. Long-term trends are what really matter. No one really knows what will happen this year or the next, obviously. But if long-term trends can’t be predicted, then maybe the BLS is worthless, and so is any form of long term thinking.
History and language aren’t “Do Nothing Studies.” They have a real curriculum and a base of knowledge. I’m thinking more along the lines of “general studies.”
Will we need 1 million or 2 million more engineers in the next X years? Can’t say, but it sure isn’t 20k or 20 million. Will we need 10k or 10 million more journalists in X years? Probably closer to 10k.
It’s not very easy to do this, which is why degrees need versatility. For example, if you study English, perhaps you should be trained to teach, to be a journalist, and to do many other things that English majors are qualified to do.
I apologize if I was insensitive when listing about “useless degrees”.
The point I guess I was trying to make was that college models right now focus on increasing enrollments to capture subsidies. They do this easily by having a plethora of majors students can pick, in which most students like to pick psychology, history, etc because it’s 1) easier than other majors and 2) most have no idea what they want to do in life so they treat college as an “enlightenment” period to learn about the world. While there is nothing inherently wrong with studying what you want, to have the government fully subsidize it and have kids not becoming directly more productive is a problem. I am critical of these “easy” degrees because so many people go into them and the evidence is there that they were not worth the amount of government intervention. The more the government gives in loans and grants, the more students will go in that have no business going into college and getting degrees that may help with general skills and knowledge, but in no way justify the subsidies they are receiving.
I would not care if a system of merit existed like Bright Futures and Zell Miller where if you got the GPA/ACT to go to school, by god you can study what you want and graduate successfully into employment with the support of your state. I am concerned with more students going into college from poorly regulated federal subsidies to avoid the dismal job market and just pump prices up even more while academic infrastructure crumbles. Initiatives proposed by Bernie or Clinton sound good in getting more kids into college but they still do not have enough regulation points that make it efficient. I am not suggesting “people get engineering degrees or you’re SOL”. What I am saying though is giving education subsidies to everyone is inefficient and a misallocation of resources. People can choose what they think is right for them. That is the premise of a free society. My main concern that I just want to get through is that we already have a problem with kids getting out in 4 years from every reason from 1) their parents enable them to 2) the schools don’t have the care or will to get students their classes needed to graduate on time or 3) kids change their majors all the time or discover something new they want, thus prolonging their study. It is unfortunate that high schools in this country stress so much about college without addressing direction of what you want to do in life. They tell you to just go in and figure it out and that the loans will pay off in time. I still remember that senior lecture they had for us…
I am all for giving the best students the subsidies they need to go for college and letting them choose what is best for them on their own. I do not share that same premise for a kid with under a 3.0 GPA and 21 ACT to do whatever he wants on taxpayer dime. Sometimes a little hard work on their own grows character and maturity needed. Help those with the promise now while giving the chance for others later on when they prove themselves, whether by improvement in cc or working for a while.
Another huge complaint I have is that colleges boost enrollments at a rate quicker than they can expand their academic infrastructure and thus you have everything from history, psychology, sports managements, engineering, etc being placed in huge lecture halls as a way to manage the growth instead of more focused, smaller classrooms. The need for subsidies by colleges and boosting enrollment as a method of expansion has instead overwhelmed the capacity that these colleges can adequately teach students. The colleges are doing a disservice to the students to stick them in 300+ student lecture halls for intro classes and have them sink or swim. Those who fail are swept under the rug and they drop out with nothing to show for it but debt…this is most unfortunate with first generation students who go in and these massive behemoth universities don’t have the money or even care to give more personal instruction for students who struggle with education. To simply grow the classroom while these colleges grow fat with government money makes everyone suffer.
@NeoDymium in #93 wrote, among other things:
You keep asserting things like this, but you haven’t provided any evidence beyond appeals to common sense, or claims along the lines of government contracts consistently leading to cost overruns or other such nonsense. Please provide some sort of real evidence for your claims of the bloatedness of college cost structures, or step back from the claims.
I’ve always said an art major should have a required business minor, because 10% of the degree is your art ability, and 90% of it is your ability to market yourself and run your brand like a business.
I think that would probably apply for a lot of majors (the business and/or marketing minor).
Big help would be finding a way for high school to be more meaningful (at least for large numbers of kids). A lot of the remedial work done in college should have been learned in high school. Vocational, technical and trade skills could also be taught in high school as well.
A lot of it does come from personal experience since it’s very hard to objectively evaluate that something is nonvital- you can always just toss some form of “it’s vital for some people” argument in perpetuity. But here’s a nice article that discusses the issue of debt, college income, and expenditures in depth:
http://debtandsociety.org/publication/borrowing_against_the_future/
The gist of it is that students pay the costs of schools adding additional infrastructure in one way or another. It’s not awful, but a lot of people would prefer free college to non-essential perks.
I’d love free everything. Why pay my share of a colonoscopy when it could be free? Economists AND physicians would tell you that free colonoscopy’s are a terrible idea. That without any sort of gate-keeping (my co-pay and deductible) people would get unnecessary procedures. A small fraction would die from complications of the anesthesia (so that’s a bad outcome), a small fraction would get mis-diagnosed with a cancer they don’t have, the long term mortality rates from colon cancer probably wouldn’t budge because the people who don’t have my type of insurance (which covers most but not all of this procedure) still aren’t getting the procedure since they can’t afford it at all.
And worse yet- more med students would be enticed into the fabulously lucrative field of Gastro because of the huge demand for doctors who can perform these “Free” colonoscopy’s, drawing away aspiring physicians from primary care and other specialties that aren’t offering Free/On Demand.
More free please.
I hire for a living. I can write a book on kids who graduate from college with “worthless” degrees. Either they majored in something they hated because their parents demanded it- so the world has a terrible accountant now instead of a kick-ass speech therapist or occupational therapist… or they majored in something they hated but needed to declare a major and now at the age of 22 they think maybe grad school will help? or they majored in something nice and practical like Real Estate Development only to find that the top corporations in real estate development hire people with degrees in urban planning or political science or finance or civil or mechanical engineering… i.e. not some made up major called “Real Estate Development”.