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.
