College will already be made free in due time but it won't be from a government funded university. It will simply be from a private organization making the courses on their own and putting them online for free. People won't believe this but the technology already exists for it to occur. Most of college is simply organized textbook reading, with lectures, homework, exams etc. All of which can be digitized and delivered over the internet. Homework and exams can be digitally graded. Final exams can be proctored at a testing center like prometric. This system will deliver essentially the same results as a traditional university.
Seems like right now, the benefit of the education we're providing is waning. Making it free will deal with the student loan crisis, but won't make the education worth more.
Seems like, in terms of income/job prospects, you're better off studying to be an electrician or plumber (which is relatively cheap) than getting a BA in liberal arts or the humanities (which is relatively expensive). If this is the case, solution definitely isn't to encourage more people to do the latter.
Done right, educating people should lead to them being more productive and producing a richer society. Done right, it's an investment that produces more wealth than it costs.
Somewhere there's a point where it costs more than it produces, dependent on how much time the person will spend being a more-educated person before they die, and I expect also dependent on the precise education being imparted, but I'd be surprised if that line was where the free education cut-off currently is.
> Done right, educating people should lead to them being more productive and producing a richer society.
Define done right. General education does have positive externalities and we provide that for everyone up to the end of high school. However, college and beyond is about specializing. There are many majors that have way to many students majoring in them only to end up getting a job out of college that does not use any of the skills they learned in college. I do not see how subsidizing those students would be beneficial.
In this particular case, it is a somewhat circular argument. Identify education that would benefit society. Give it away for free. Watch society become more wealthy. Everybody wins. I'm not convinced that the list of "education that would benefit society" is as limited as the current STEM obsessives would have us believe, but it's a starting point; it also doesn't have to be just university education. Nationwide shortage of electricians, for example? No worries. Free electrician education ahoy.
The only problem is that this practical, pragmatic approach violates some people's morals. Similarly to how the US could have a far cheaper, far more effective corrections system, but that be morally objectionable for too many people.
On a personal note, I'm not convinced that the end of high school is the correct cut-off point for free education (particularly given that the US has become a far more technological society and economy over the last century), but I don't have any evidence for that. It would seem something of a suspicious coincidence.
Done right there'd be a quota on professions which have negative ROI, i.e. for English majors and philosophers. Until that's in place, "free" college will not have the results you desire and will be a money sink on a truly staggering scale. Besides, even if college is free, room and board is most certainly not free.
What do you know what's right? To know what is right you need to see the future and I highly doubt anyone can. Let people decide by themselves. If they get in debt to study some "useless" degree it's their fault. The rest of the tax payers shouldn't be forced to pay for their mistakes.
I'd like to see more public spending on education in the US, but I think this explains why college is getting more expensive. 40-50 years ago, investing in education carried huge returns, because cheaper college made people more likely to choose that path than to get a decent job right out of high school. Today, there's not as much need for public investment in education because the work force is already nearly over-educated, at least in terms of the numbers of people available for many jobs that have specific education requirements.
We should make it real cheap to get educated as a doctor or nurse though (and most other medical stuff). Sure, they have great personal returns on their education now, but that's exactly what we want to erode, by flooding the market.
Do you mean we want to erode doctor/nurse pay because that's what's causing high healthcare costs?
It's been awhile since I worked in healthcare but I don't think primary care provider pay is high on the list of most impactful cost cutting improvements
My experience is that doctors are not the primary bottleneck but the system is rather inefficient in many other aspects.
I think if you add more people to a bad system you tend to make things worse. Better to fix the process rather than throw more (poorly managed) resources at it
It seems like a lot of the excess value will be captured by the person who attended college, if that's true aren't they the very person to pay for it? If it isn't why bother with it at all?
Done right, they produce more wealth and some of that wealth goes to society. It's not just that they pay more tax; they also simply produce more wealth, which is not a zero sum game. Over a lifetime, society benefits and the person benefits. Everyone wins. Done right.
Stretching the discussion a little, we could ask the same question about all education. Why is any of it free? But the benefits to the United States (for example) of almost everyone being able to read and write (for example) are incredible. If a large proportion of the US population had dropped out of school before being able to read and write (because of the cost), the US would be extraordinarily less wealthy. Everyone would lose out.
This isn't the kind of value they could use to build a big castle and cut themselves off from society. Education isn't like giving someone money - they still have to go out and use that education to make money. It's the society at large that reaps benefits of an educated person - through more specialized work being done, and through better social interactions.
Name the last time an aircraft carrier won a battle, stopped an attack, etc. Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carriers cost 13~ billion dollars to construct and the bill for operating a carrier group: $2.5 million a day (based on a quick Google query).
13 billion is 325,000 degrees at 40k each or 260,000 at 50k each.
21 B-2 stealth bombers from Northrop Grumman in the 1980s and 1990s at a price of more than $2 billion each. 2 billion in 1990 is equal to 9.8 billion dollars today. That's 4-5 million 4-year degrees for what those 21 aircraft cost!!!
Also if you educate 100 people, the majority of them will provide benefit to the economy via any number of ways. The government already throws tons of money at educational institutions, but as research grants for military/defense research, why not educate the populace? For that matter, why not create government educational institutions that cut out all of the fluff and in upon completion of a program you enter into an income share agreement for 5-10 years at 10-5%.
> Name the last time an aircraft carrier won a battle, stopped an attack, etc.
The primary benefit of a large conventional military is to deter such an event from even happening. That said, the air support provided from carriers definitely helped a great deal to curb and reverse the spread of ISIS.
> Also if you educate 100 people, the majority of them will provide benefit to the economy via any number of ways.
If this were true, then it would be economically advantageous for those 100 people to borrow the money themselves (perhaps with the help of a government subsidy). And they do.
>The primary benefit of a large conventional military is to deter such an event from even happening. That said, the air support provided from carriers definitely helped a great deal to curb and reverse the spread of ISIS.
I'd believe that, a decade or two ago. The Global Hawk drone has a declassified record of 33.1 hours of flight time at 60,000 feet though for surveillance and doesn't have pilot fatigue as swapping out a pilot is as simple as "hey Greg,your shift is about over, stand up whenever you're ready and I'll take over watching the monitors".
UCAVs (unnamed combat aerial vehicles) are possessed by more than 20 confirmed countries. The United States as 2 publcily known variants, the MQ-1 since 1995 and the MQ-9 since 2001. The MQ-9 costs about 16 million dollars, can carry 750lbs of payload to 50,000 feet and fly for 30 hours or carry considerably more (like Hellifre, JDAM, laser guided bombs etc) for much shorter periods. These can take off from any sufficiently long flat surface, can be transported anywhere in the world in C-17s and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if they've devised a way to launch them out of C-17s.
As ISIS doesn't have fighter jets, there's no need to have fighter jets ready to take off to engage them. Aerial combat as a whole is effectively a thing of yesteryear.
Having a giant floating city in the ocean six-thousand persons simply isn't necessary anymore. Yes, we need certain types of ships for guarding ports and trade routes by aircraft carriers are gross overkill and largely the money-giving beast of lobbyists, politicians and defense contractors.
>If this were true, then it would be economically advantageous for those 100 people to borrow the money themselves
Except for the part where college tuition is outrageous, many many people do not qualify for government subsidized loans and interest rates on private loans can be outrageous and you could easily be servicing the loans for DECADES unless you want to live in a van with 3 other people.
> Having a giant floating city in the ocean six-thousand persons simply isn't necessary anymore. Yes, we need certain types of ships for guarding ports and trade routes by aircraft carriers are gross overkill and largely the money-giving beast of lobbyists, politicians and defense contractors.
The same could be said about traditional universities, especially now that, as you point out, they're so expensive that the cost is ruinous on a per-capita basis. I see no reason that this would change if the cost was borne by the federal government any more than the cost of the Navy would change.
God no. We subsidized the shit out of college last century. On average it's not any better (the tech it uses is, but the university systems themselves are stagnant), yet it's much much more costly. Making it free would only continue this trend.
I'm an academic so I'm biased. Administration is out of control but I think there would be some real benefits to free or drastically cheaper college education in the USA. There are studies that have shown that the more educated you are the less likely you are to commit crime (of course there is the old correlation vs causation question) and other issues so it would benefit society to offer cheaper education.
But the problem is when we make college more affordable it's value decreases meanwhile the product doesn't get any better. You're absolutely right about administration, but there are a myriad of other money suckers that have arisen.
I think part of the solution if you truly want cheaper education is remove all but core classes from the required curriculum so students aren't laying for bs classes majority of them retain none of. Then allow any student to sit in on any class they have personal interest in and allow generic automatic testing so the student can get a general feel for if they learned well enough (though my opinions on testing are low overall, I know many students still like the benchmark).
I don't think value will decrease, just more weight will be put on what school you were able to get into. Let in state college be free and let these state schools take the same # of students they take now (very near maximum dorm capacity anywhere), and acceptance rates will just plummet. College is hard to scale, you need to build and hire from a very limited labor pool to grow and it would probably take decades as a result.
Free college would just lower acceptance rates at good state schools and allow more people to complete degrees in community colleges. If anything it will make state school degrees even more valuable; roughly the same number of people will graduate from the same school but the cohort will be academically stronger.
IDK what you were imagining exactly with that last bit, but at my old uni you could test out of basically any class by paying $60 and taking essentially the final in the testing center; if you got >70% iirc you got credit for the course and could advance to the next but no a grade.
It's going to decrease value for the average student. It'll be ever more where you go than what you know.
If anything it will increase value? Don't buy it. What's your reasoning? Look at the value of college today on avg compared to that of 30 years ago and adjust inflation. People pay much more for what they get now than they did then, because of the saturation.
With the last bit - if you major in chemistry you don't have to take art or anything not chemistry. If you're art you take art. It's a sham that you're required to take all those other classes. They do very little for the vast majority, and if you want the knowledge you can take the classes as you'd like.
As the school becomes more selective due to a larger applicant pool, the degree becomes more prestigious and valuable, because it signals the school takes the very best applicants and therefore has the very best students in the ranks.
School shouldn't be job training only. I majored in a stem field and my favorite classes where the ones where I dove into classical literature, believe it or not. Sure, the degree got me my job, but it also exposed me to the liberal arts in a way that would have been impossible if I tried to study it on my own, because it actively challenged me to step into another field for a minute and reach out to unfamiliar sources to build understanding. There's value in being a well rounded, educated citizen, in my book. The academies of ancient Greece weren't training better farmers or builders, they were training better thinkers and therefore better citizens. That's what modern colleges try to do when they make you take liberal arts classes for an engineering degree. And a chemist who's taken time to learn to read, study, and write well is going to be a better professional chemist than someone who's just done grunt work in the lab and slogged through the chem series, because not only has that better scientist also done that, they've polished their intangibles through liberal arts classes.
> I think part of the solution if you truly want cheaper education is remove all but core classes from the required curriculum
Why not remove the fat then? If you cut classes, this won't make institutional parasites disappear, as they'll invent other things to justify their existence. I feel the ballooning overhead surrounding the core mission (here: education and scientific research) needs to be addressed directly.
I do not believe this is true on an absolute, inflation-adjusted level. This may be true relative to the increasing costs, but it's not like those costs have provided a proportional benefit anyway.
You are right. Overall funding of education is up across the board, but down per-student as Universities try to grow like businesses (bigger and bigger classes every year). Enrollment balloons, so spending per student goes down despite increasing investments in education.
Ballooning enrollment leads to more money spent on facilities and administration, which means even less money goes directly toward educating students.
At least in California, state funding to the UC system has definitely decreased if adjusted for inflation and population growth. Adjusted only for inflation, it's decreased in some time frames and is flat in other time frames. Here are a few years, all in inflation-adjusted 2019$:
So in the inflation-adjusted numbers, there's been a decrease since 2000 (and 1990), but flat compared to 1980. The state population has increased from 24 million in 1980 to 39 million today though, and state law mandates that UC expand in line with population growth (they're required to accept the top 12.5% of California high school graduates). So per-student funding has declined by more than $10k in 2019$, compared to 1980. In-state tuition has risen by about the same amount over the same period, making up the difference.
