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I feel like all the collage should be free people are not thinking far enough ahead to what that actually means. 1) A free collage will end up being more like

I feel like all the collage should be free people are not thinking far enough ahead to what that actually means. 1) A free collage will end up being more like extended high school. 2) At some point new institutes of for pay higher education will pop up. They just won't be called colleges. People who can afford them will clearly have a advantage and top companies will start to seek out people who attended these organizations. 3) The quality of the education will drop. It already has at a lot of schools with the introduction of loan for everybody gig. While this will reset thing for a while. Maybe even a generation of two. We will end up again with people wanting the next level of education free. EDIT: now that I am not trying to type on a tiny phone. The problem with free is it will then need to cater to the LCD. Right now we we have a filter on the LCD because there is some effort and risk required by the person going to school. There is something special about buying something, and owning it. You tend to tend for it better, give it the attention it needs and ensure it last a long time. If we bypass this step we will end up with masses going to school doing the same thing they do in high school today. This might be hard to visualize as the HN crowd is a fairly smart crowd and probably took advantage of the offerings of their high school, and likely were not aware of those who did not. This won't be as big of an issue for those who are "gifted" as they will be sheltered in their special classes slotted away with like minded ilk. But for the less "gifted" student the expense will be dragged down to the LCD. So if you are not lucky, smart enough, or had the right coaching from parents to get into those gifted classes you will be left with a much worse education.

chimeracoder 8y ago
To an extent, this is what's already happened. If you actually look at a lot of college curricula - including at the top schools, but especially at the rest - a lot of that is dedicated to making up for the failings of K-12 education, particularly high school. To a degree, expecting college education of people is really just filtering for the baseline that we would like a high school degree to guarantee, but which it isn't.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
I don't think anyone is suggesting all private institutions should be tuition free. NYU chose to do it for medical school, however the progressives in USA just want public college to be tuition free. I doubt those outcomes will come to pass. Tuition used to be basically free in the USA, and it already is in many European nations, and we didn't/don't see those outcomes that you worry about.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  I did not have time, write this when I made my original post. Just because I don't agree with free does not mean I am for the inverse which is crazy high tuitions. In my opinion the crazy high tuitions is a result of guaranteeing people loans. Demand went up on a near fixed supply thus cost went up. Then when people who probably should have not been going to school started dropping out the schools saw that as a loss of revenue and fixed the problem by lowering the bar to make sure they did not have as many dropouts thus keeping their revenue up. Nobody ever likes to see a drop in revenue even if the spike was caused by artificial means. Free market really only works if you don't have people messing around with it. It's not a free market for schools if everybody can get a loan.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
If you look at the UK, which has in recent years gone from free to firstly low tuition fees and more recently exorbitant tuition fees, the reverse seems to be true. In making university a £9k a year proposition universities seem to have significantly increased student expectations along the lines of "I paid for this, I expect top marks", along with vast increases in appeals etc. It does not seem to have increased educational expectations - just transactional. This seems to be particularly prevalent with overseas students who pay even higher fees. Universities have, in the main, happily adopted the profit mentality by providing and offering less and increasing class sizes. My conclusion is by adopting a high fee model we have significantly weakened further education in the UK.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  Yeah, I don't think high fees are the answer either. Costly and free are both extreme and probably won't do what we want them to do. We need something just right, something that both the schools, and students still have some skin in the game so they are obligated / motivated to perform their best. I think a free market mostly can cover do this, and it seemed to work out fine for many many years in the US until we started giving crazy loans out to everybody. And don't get me started, on the bs that we need free school because low income kids won't be able to go. Harvard has a fund for low income students that goes untapped every year, they even make a effort to get low income kids (from my understanding mostly underprivileged minorities) to take advantage of the funding available, but yet, hardly anybody does.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    I think you're right. In the UK context, the first incarnation of fees appeared to work OK and not bring the negatives that are becoming clear after the introduction of high fees. Even the overseas students paying higher fees seemed to bring less expectation and entitlement to a first whilst standard fees were only £3k, which I can't explain. Of course the other aspect when fees were first introduced was the policy to significantly increase numbers attending university. This brought its own set of problems including harming standards (unavoidable of course) and vocational institutions, and no end of colleges remaking themselves as universities.
FeteCommuniste 8y ago
If financial risk really encouraged effort and perseverance, we would expect university dropout rates in countries like France or Germany to be far higher than in the US or UK. Is that actually the case?
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  France Germany both have something like a 50% drop out rate, much like the US according to my recent searches. The UK has ~7% but has been rising over the past 3 years. As far as I can tell you still pay in the UK but tuition is fully covered in both Germany and France, expect France has already started the thing I said they would with a second more elite school. And you better bet a grad from a free university vs the elite university competing for the same job the guy who paid is going to probably win more often than not. For what it's worth free and or guaranteed loan is the same, and I would expect the same outcomes in the long run. At least with the loan part we might wise up and stop demanding every kid goes and gets a higher education. Note, I am not coming from somebody who was able to pay, or took loans out to go to school. I did the math, and I simply could not afford to go to any university, not even the cheap ones that were local. I tried, and saw the deb increasing while working for $8 a hr. What did I do? I quit, and focused on my job, and spent every free second learning a skill that I could make money with. That just so happens to be computers/programming/and data centers. For a while there my friends and peers that went to school looked like they were going to pass me up, but by the the time they got out of school loaded with deb I had already double the income they would be able to start out with. Today I know very few people who went to school who make more than me, and those that do still have massive amounts of debt. Now I maybe lucky, but I know to many people like me, and meet to many people who have taken the same path as I did to put it all on the notion that I was just lucky.

chimeracoder 8y ago

To an extent, this is what's already happened. If you actually look at a lot of college curricula - including at the top schools, but especially at the rest - a lot of that is dedicated to making up for the failings of K-12 education, particularly high school. To a degree, expecting college education of people is really just filtering for the baseline that we would like a high school degree to guarantee, but which it isn't.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

I don't think anyone is suggesting all private institutions should be tuition free. NYU chose to do it for medical school, however the progressives in USA just want public college to be tuition free. I doubt those outcomes will come to pass. Tuition used to be basically free in the USA, and it already is in many European nations, and we didn't/don't see those outcomes that you worry about.

mbrumlow 8y ago
I did not have time, write this when I made my original post. Just because I don't agree with free does not mean I am for the inverse which is crazy high tuitions. In my opinion the crazy high tuitions is a result of guaranteeing people loans. Demand went up on a near fixed supply thus cost went up. Then when people who probably should have not been going to school started dropping out the schools saw that as a loss of revenue and fixed the problem by lowering the bar to make sure they did not have as many dropouts thus keeping their revenue up. Nobody ever likes to see a drop in revenue even if the spike was caused by artificial means. Free market really only works if you don't have people messing around with it. It's not a free market for schools if everybody can get a loan.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

If you look at the UK, which has in recent years gone from free to firstly low tuition fees and more recently exorbitant tuition fees, the reverse seems to be true. In making university a £9k a year proposition universities seem to have significantly increased student expectations along the lines of "I paid for this, I expect top marks", along with vast increases in appeals etc. It does not seem to have increased educational expectations - just transactional. This seems to be particularly prevalent with overseas students who pay even higher fees. Universities have, in the main, happily adopted the profit mentality by providing and offering less and increasing class sizes. My conclusion is by adopting a high fee model we have significantly weakened further education in the UK.

mbrumlow 8y ago
Yeah, I don't think high fees are the answer either. Costly and free are both extreme and probably won't do what we want them to do. We need something just right, something that both the schools, and students still have some skin in the game so they are obligated / motivated to perform their best. I think a free market mostly can cover do this, and it seemed to work out fine for many many years in the US until we started giving crazy loans out to everybody. And don't get me started, on the bs that we need free school because low income kids won't be able to go. Harvard has a fund for low income students that goes untapped every year, they even make a effort to get low income kids (from my understanding mostly underprivileged minorities) to take advantage of the funding available, but yet, hardly anybody does.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  I think you're right. In the UK context, the first incarnation of fees appeared to work OK and not bring the negatives that are becoming clear after the introduction of high fees. Even the overseas students paying higher fees seemed to bring less expectation and entitlement to a first whilst standard fees were only £3k, which I can't explain. Of course the other aspect when fees were first introduced was the policy to significantly increase numbers attending university. This brought its own set of problems including harming standards (unavoidable of course) and vocational institutions, and no end of colleges remaking themselves as universities.

FeteCommuniste 8y ago

If financial risk really encouraged effort and perseverance, we would expect university dropout rates in countries like France or Germany to be far higher than in the US or UK. Is that actually the case?

mbrumlow 8y ago
France Germany both have something like a 50% drop out rate, much like the US according to my recent searches. The UK has ~7% but has been rising over the past 3 years. As far as I can tell you still pay in the UK but tuition is fully covered in both Germany and France, expect France has already started the thing I said they would with a second more elite school. And you better bet a grad from a free university vs the elite university competing for the same job the guy who paid is going to probably win more often than not. For what it's worth free and or guaranteed loan is the same, and I would expect the same outcomes in the long run. At least with the loan part we might wise up and stop demanding every kid goes and gets a higher education. Note, I am not coming from somebody who was able to pay, or took loans out to go to school. I did the math, and I simply could not afford to go to any university, not even the cheap ones that were local. I tried, and saw the deb increasing while working for $8 a hr. What did I do? I quit, and focused on my job, and spent every free second learning a skill that I could make money with. That just so happens to be computers/programming/and data centers. For a while there my friends and peers that went to school looked like they were going to pass me up, but by the the time they got out of school loaded with deb I had already double the income they would be able to start out with. Today I know very few people who went to school who make more than me, and those that do still have massive amounts of debt. Now I maybe lucky, but I know to many people like me, and meet to many people who have taken the same path as I did to put it all on the notion that I was just lucky.