5 ms·

What a surreal discussion about something obvious: University and college should be free for everyone. First, this is a great equalizer in the positive way: it

by geff82 8y ago

What a surreal discussion about something obvious: University and college should be free for everyone. First, this is a great equalizer in the positive way: it does not depend on how wealthy your parents are, so you get an equal opportunity. Second: the society as a whole benefits from well educated people. Accounts need well trained doctors, doctors need well trained accountants, both need an engineer to craft them a reliable car, etc etc... Countries like Germany show that university/med school can both be free and high quality. Od course also in Germany some private elite universities exists where you have to pay (it is ok, I like diversity). But to get a perfect career, a state run university is all you need.

avip 8y ago
Always replace "free" with "I'm paying for you". I don't know what's "obvious" about me paying your tuition fees. For once, I may be happy to fund your auto-mechanic studies as I know I'll need you to fix my car. But if you're studying ancient Akkadian I'm less inclined to pay your bills.
- orbifold 8y ago
  If you are not super rich most likely you are paying a tiny fraction towards the higher education of someone else's child. Plus if you have kids you benefit from the same system. I actually know several people with useless degrees that now have well paid jobs here in Germany, one studied Ancient Greek and Latin and is now at Germanies federal reserve the other studied art history and is now a SAP consultant. Those degrees are also much cheaper than training everyone in STEM fields.
  - hayd 8y ago
    Math is pretty cheap too.
    - orbifold 8y ago
      Good luck training more than 2% of your population in math without significantly degrading the difficulty, I studied math and probably half of the people dropped out after the first semester.
  - geff82 8y ago
    You, my fellow German (Frankfurter? I know too many people at the federal reserve...), are making the same mistake as most: beancounting and measuring everything in money. Degrees in Ancient Greek and Latin mean that besides being rich in money, society is also rich in culture. We might need more STEM probably, but we would miss the people knowledgeable in cultural things a lot.
- jkaplowitz 8y ago
  I actually took an Akkadian course during my undergraduate years. It doesn't help directly with most careers, of course. But that and the other humanities courses I took there and in high school make me a better-rounded member of society. Especially grateful for the Islamic Civilization course giving me an informed attitude toward Muslim friends and colleagues, and for my Latin and French studies helping my SAT scores and enabling me to immigrate to Quebec. My degree was in computer science overall. Though aspects of student life and paid employment at my university helped my career and skillset way more than even the CS classes. In my particular case, my parents paid for my education, but they could only afford that because US science education funding policies when they were students let them gain cheap entry to well-paying professions. Both of their undergraduate degrees were in the humanities. Before that, my one grandfather who went to college got a good education at what was then a free city university, and I'm sure it helped his attitudes toward my dad's education. Many of my great-grandparents were poor Jewish immigrants at a time when the US immigration policies were extremely open for healthy light-skinned immigrants from Europe (even their low-class type). I've had several high-paying tech jobs and paid plenty of taxes to society, but clearly these elements of my family history are factors in enabling that, not just anything about my career-related classes. All of which is to say, we all benefit from affordable education, in surprisingly broad ways that rebound down generations and across spheres of activity. We shouldn't take a narrow vocational approach to this.
- geff82 8y ago
  >> Always replace "free" with "I'm paying for you". Your thinking is flawed in this regard. Sure you are paying "my" tuition fees. But in an either indirect or direct way, you (you as the society, not necessarily you as the single person) are also profiting from my services. And as you are more than a being measured by money, but a human with a cultural background, even studying Akkadian on taxpayer's money might be ok (as long as not everyone does it). I am a semi-libertarian myself so I get your argument somehow. Then again I am for equal opportunity (not equal outcomes) and providing education for free is a great equalizer and a great way that people can actually live up to their potential (or not, in which case they still need well educated doctors, car mechanics, whatever...). Good education also does not have to be really expensive by itself, it is a matter of organizing. When I hear the big US universities hording billions, I know that there is too much money in the system.
- namdnay 8y ago
  Are you really that petty in real life? Or is this just an absolutist argument?
  - iak8god 8y ago
    "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- talltimtom 8y ago
  That is like saying you only want to pay taxes towards the roads you drive on yourself. Would you be better off if all publicly funded roads where instead private and required you to pay tolls per usage? You would defiantly get an bill more matching your usage, and people who don’t drive would pay less. But it at least feels like we are better off with public roads because they all add value to society as a whole. The same goes for education. You don’t care about Akkadian studies, but perhaps someone does who thanks to his education can focus on that and earn enough money to buy a car from you auto mechanic keeping him in business making life better for you.
  - originalbryan2 8y ago
    I love the private toll road idea! I'd never imagined them all being that way before.
  - mdorazio 8y ago
    You've basically just described Dallas (although it's mostly just the freeways that have tolls), which a lot of Americans seem to be fine with.
  - dionidium 8y ago
    > "That is like saying you only want to pay taxes towards the roads you drive on yourself." People who use roads should be paying a lot more for their usage and they should be paying much more directly. So, in short, yes. The current system is far too diffuse, masks enormous externalities, and generates incredible waste.
  - neap24 8y ago
    Indeed, many do advocate that paying for the roads you drive on through tolls would be a much better system. I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to subsidize certain fields of study with public money. In the past, when a smaller percentage of people were "educated" the marginal value of educating an extra member of society was very high. It seems much lower to me now that information is cheap and freely available.
    - 8y ago
- CPLX 8y ago
  Indeed. Also please stop saying “freeway” and start saying “somebody else paying for me way” next time you’re giving directions. It’s commonly understood that “free” in the context of public services means paid for collectively by government. We totally get that and are still cool with it.
- alexc05 8y ago
  "Investing" people who graduate from university earn more than people who don’t. Skills and thinking patterns developed in studying any advanced degree generalize to other pursuits. It doesn’t matter that the critical thinking skills etc were built in a subject you personally do not value. The person is improved through the process and their earning potential is increased. Your return on investment comes later when they’re paying taxes, which are on average higher than they would have been without assistance. At scale, this kind of investment will pay for itself. There will undoubtedly be outliers on the down side you’d be able to point to, but did you know that philosophy degrees are disproportionately represented among CEO’s? Don’t pick the subjects, just invest in it all and reap the rewards. It will help offset your "social assistance" costs as well. Food stamps, housing supplement, welfare... education gets people out of that. Spend money to make money.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    > did you know that philosophy degrees are disproportionately represented among CEO’s? I did know this, but I wonder which way the causality goes. perhaps CEO's are disproportionately likely to have come from wealthy families who could afford to send them to elite liberal arts colleges and/or afford to pursue a degree without direct applications.
- jpambrun 8y ago
  Because you will get your investment back tenfold with imposition? This is proven to work in many counties..
- bob_marley2 8y ago
  You pay for roads which Thieves, Street Racers and other criminals use on a daily basis, where's your outrage for that?
Karishma1234 8y ago
"Free" means someone else should be paying for it. Now, as an average income guy I will never earn as much as a Doctor and will vehemently oppose any move to pay for these would be rich people's education. If the degree is worth something, please pay it yourself. >Countries like Germany show All these kids are more than welcome to go to Germany and save $500K in tuition fees.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  Now, as an average income guy I will never earn as much as a Doctor and will vehemently oppose any move to pay for these would be rich people's education Yet... that would cease to be the case. You wouldn't be paying for rich people's education. You'd be paying for education for whatever person put in the study time to be a doctor, based on actual merit instead of merit + money. It means that you would have that same chance at schooling. It would mean that doctors could make less money and it probably more likely to live in areas with fewer doctors. And hey, if they become rich, they'll be paying it back into the system and paying for more education that you, as an average-income worker, ever would.
  - Karishma1234 8y ago
    404 logic not found. You just want to forcibly take away my money so you can feel good.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- namdnay 8y ago
  > as an average income guy I will never earn as much as a Doctor Maybe if you had had free education you could have been a high income guy, perhaps even a doctor!
- alkonaut 8y ago
  Publicly funded MDs means they aren’t as well paid. It’s no longer a super privileged class who took a great financial risk they must be rewarded for. They are paid well, just like an engineer. But I’m sure if you look at what a Danish doctor earns you’ll see one reason why healthcare is cheaper to produce there. Once higher education is a public service and not a personal investment, there is much lower returns expected.
bob_marley2 8y ago
This is because Americans have a collective mental illness when it comes to publicly funding societal goods.
- sctb 8y ago
  Trolling will get your account banned here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by geff82 8y ago

avip 8y ago

Always replace "free" with "I'm paying for you". I don't know what's "obvious" about me paying your tuition fees. For once, I may be happy to fund your auto-mechanic studies as I know I'll need you to fix my car. But if you're studying ancient Akkadian I'm less inclined to pay your bills.

orbifold 8y ago
If you are not super rich most likely you are paying a tiny fraction towards the higher education of someone else's child. Plus if you have kids you benefit from the same system. I actually know several people with useless degrees that now have well paid jobs here in Germany, one studied Ancient Greek and Latin and is now at Germanies federal reserve the other studied art history and is now a SAP consultant. Those degrees are also much cheaper than training everyone in STEM fields.
- hayd 8y ago
  Math is pretty cheap too.
  - orbifold 8y ago
    Good luck training more than 2% of your population in math without significantly degrading the difficulty, I studied math and probably half of the people dropped out after the first semester.
- geff82 8y ago
  You, my fellow German (Frankfurter? I know too many people at the federal reserve...), are making the same mistake as most: beancounting and measuring everything in money. Degrees in Ancient Greek and Latin mean that besides being rich in money, society is also rich in culture. We might need more STEM probably, but we would miss the people knowledgeable in cultural things a lot.
jkaplowitz 8y ago
I actually took an Akkadian course during my undergraduate years. It doesn't help directly with most careers, of course. But that and the other humanities courses I took there and in high school make me a better-rounded member of society. Especially grateful for the Islamic Civilization course giving me an informed attitude toward Muslim friends and colleagues, and for my Latin and French studies helping my SAT scores and enabling me to immigrate to Quebec. My degree was in computer science overall. Though aspects of student life and paid employment at my university helped my career and skillset way more than even the CS classes. In my particular case, my parents paid for my education, but they could only afford that because US science education funding policies when they were students let them gain cheap entry to well-paying professions. Both of their undergraduate degrees were in the humanities. Before that, my one grandfather who went to college got a good education at what was then a free city university, and I'm sure it helped his attitudes toward my dad's education. Many of my great-grandparents were poor Jewish immigrants at a time when the US immigration policies were extremely open for healthy light-skinned immigrants from Europe (even their low-class type). I've had several high-paying tech jobs and paid plenty of taxes to society, but clearly these elements of my family history are factors in enabling that, not just anything about my career-related classes. All of which is to say, we all benefit from affordable education, in surprisingly broad ways that rebound down generations and across spheres of activity. We shouldn't take a narrow vocational approach to this.
geff82 8y ago
>> Always replace "free" with "I'm paying for you". Your thinking is flawed in this regard. Sure you are paying "my" tuition fees. But in an either indirect or direct way, you (you as the society, not necessarily you as the single person) are also profiting from my services. And as you are more than a being measured by money, but a human with a cultural background, even studying Akkadian on taxpayer's money might be ok (as long as not everyone does it). I am a semi-libertarian myself so I get your argument somehow. Then again I am for equal opportunity (not equal outcomes) and providing education for free is a great equalizer and a great way that people can actually live up to their potential (or not, in which case they still need well educated doctors, car mechanics, whatever...). Good education also does not have to be really expensive by itself, it is a matter of organizing. When I hear the big US universities hording billions, I know that there is too much money in the system.
namdnay 8y ago
Are you really that petty in real life? Or is this just an absolutist argument?
- iak8god 8y ago
  "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
talltimtom 8y ago
That is like saying you only want to pay taxes towards the roads you drive on yourself. Would you be better off if all publicly funded roads where instead private and required you to pay tolls per usage? You would defiantly get an bill more matching your usage, and people who don’t drive would pay less. But it at least feels like we are better off with public roads because they all add value to society as a whole. The same goes for education. You don’t care about Akkadian studies, but perhaps someone does who thanks to his education can focus on that and earn enough money to buy a car from you auto mechanic keeping him in business making life better for you.
- originalbryan2 8y ago
  I love the private toll road idea! I'd never imagined them all being that way before.
- mdorazio 8y ago
  You've basically just described Dallas (although it's mostly just the freeways that have tolls), which a lot of Americans seem to be fine with.
- dionidium 8y ago
  > "That is like saying you only want to pay taxes towards the roads you drive on yourself." People who use roads should be paying a lot more for their usage and they should be paying much more directly. So, in short, yes. The current system is far too diffuse, masks enormous externalities, and generates incredible waste.
- neap24 8y ago
  Indeed, many do advocate that paying for the roads you drive on through tolls would be a much better system. I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to subsidize certain fields of study with public money. In the past, when a smaller percentage of people were "educated" the marginal value of educating an extra member of society was very high. It seems much lower to me now that information is cheap and freely available.
  - 8y ago
CPLX 8y ago
Indeed. Also please stop saying “freeway” and start saying “somebody else paying for me way” next time you’re giving directions. It’s commonly understood that “free” in the context of public services means paid for collectively by government. We totally get that and are still cool with it.
alexc05 8y ago
"Investing" people who graduate from university earn more than people who don’t. Skills and thinking patterns developed in studying any advanced degree generalize to other pursuits. It doesn’t matter that the critical thinking skills etc were built in a subject you personally do not value. The person is improved through the process and their earning potential is increased. Your return on investment comes later when they’re paying taxes, which are on average higher than they would have been without assistance. At scale, this kind of investment will pay for itself. There will undoubtedly be outliers on the down side you’d be able to point to, but did you know that philosophy degrees are disproportionately represented among CEO’s? Don’t pick the subjects, just invest in it all and reap the rewards. It will help offset your "social assistance" costs as well. Food stamps, housing supplement, welfare... education gets people out of that. Spend money to make money.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > did you know that philosophy degrees are disproportionately represented among CEO’s? I did know this, but I wonder which way the causality goes. perhaps CEO's are disproportionately likely to have come from wealthy families who could afford to send them to elite liberal arts colleges and/or afford to pursue a degree without direct applications.
jpambrun 8y ago
Because you will get your investment back tenfold with imposition? This is proven to work in many counties..
bob_marley2 8y ago
You pay for roads which Thieves, Street Racers and other criminals use on a daily basis, where's your outrage for that?

Karishma1234 8y ago

"Free" means someone else should be paying for it. Now, as an average income guy I will never earn as much as a Doctor and will vehemently oppose any move to pay for these would be rich people's education. If the degree is worth something, please pay it yourself. >Countries like Germany show All these kids are more than welcome to go to Germany and save $500K in tuition fees.

Broken_Hippo 8y ago
Now, as an average income guy I will never earn as much as a Doctor and will vehemently oppose any move to pay for these would be rich people's education Yet... that would cease to be the case. You wouldn't be paying for rich people's education. You'd be paying for education for whatever person put in the study time to be a doctor, based on actual merit instead of merit + money. It means that you would have that same chance at schooling. It would mean that doctors could make less money and it probably more likely to live in areas with fewer doctors. And hey, if they become rich, they'll be paying it back into the system and paying for more education that you, as an average-income worker, ever would.
- Karishma1234 8y ago
  404 logic not found. You just want to forcibly take away my money so you can feel good.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
namdnay 8y ago
> as an average income guy I will never earn as much as a Doctor Maybe if you had had free education you could have been a high income guy, perhaps even a doctor!
alkonaut 8y ago
Publicly funded MDs means they aren’t as well paid. It’s no longer a super privileged class who took a great financial risk they must be rewarded for. They are paid well, just like an engineer. But I’m sure if you look at what a Danish doctor earns you’ll see one reason why healthcare is cheaper to produce there. Once higher education is a public service and not a personal investment, there is much lower returns expected.

bob_marley2 8y ago

This is because Americans have a collective mental illness when it comes to publicly funding societal goods.

sctb 8y ago
Trolling will get your account banned here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html