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A person gains some $N in financial gains and personal fulfillment for going to college. Regardless if tuition comes from the individual or the taxpayers, the s
by benkuykendall 11y ago
A person gains some $N in financial gains and personal fulfillment for going to college. Regardless if tuition comes from the individual or the taxpayers, the society as a whole is still paying some $M for a person to go to college. Society gains some additional $R through the person going to college.
I posit that for some individuals, sending that individual to college is beneficial to society (N + R > M), and for others, it is not (N + R <= M).
If the government decides everyone goes to college at its expense, then some individuals for whom college would not be socially beneficial will go to college. This will be a societal loss.
Alternatively, the government could try to figure our who would be beneficial to send to college, and pay only for them. This would maximize societal gain if done correctly. However, I for one would not trust the government to make this decision impartially or correctly.
But when the market decides who goes to college, it is up to each individual to decide whether or not college will be beneficial for them. Hopefully, informed individuals can make that decision correctly. (Of course, when an individual decides, they do not consider the societal benefit R, only the personal benefit N. This could be solved by a government subsidy worth R, either in a grant or in favorable interest rates on a loan.)
I do not see a reasonable way in which a controlled economy for higher education could maximize societal gains.
- littletimmy 11y agoNo. You are still analyzing it in terms of the market. I don't agree with this paradigm altogether when it comes to public good. Your sentence "a person gains some $N in ..." has absolutely no meaning for me.
- benkuykendall 11y agoHow else can we evaluate good if not by it's value? I understand that not all the benefits of college are monetary, but we need some unit of account to describe the immaterial gains of a college education. Would you rather a billion dollars or a college education? If you say the former, than value of college is clearly less than a billion dollars.
- littletimmy 11y agoSure, we can evaluate it by value. But that value does not have to be monetary. You're still thinking in the same paradigm, see? You're saying if it more than a billion dollars or less... That's not the way to talk about education. Just acknowledge it as a public good - and keep it in the public domain. Stop monetizing it. I think a good person to read on this would be John Stuart Mill, who said when the economy reaches any reasonable level of wealth that made it unnecessary to continue to grow, then the prime purpose of life becomes the development of human faculties. Things like monetary gain stop having meaning.