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“Free College” programs vary in how they define both “free” and “college”

90 points by swebs 8y ago

picsao 8y ago
Ah, nothing as elaborate as the propaganda of a creature fearing for its feast. The more interesting question. Is the difference in quality between us and European free colleges worth the cost. Or is this another public sector crawling with lets-play-free-market-parasites like the US medical sector?
Yoric 8y ago
For what it's worth, Free College works pretty well in most of Europe.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Does it? I got a chance to take a look inside and I'm no longer sure about it. Corruption is rampant (not in relation to academic results, but other things like employment, grants etc), favourism is flourishing, and huge amount of money is wasted instead of used to help the students. I personally blame the lack of monetary incentives. EDIT: What about having a discussion instead of just downvoting? I presented my observation and expected to talk about it, downvoting isn't helping anyone and my comment is on topic. EDIT2: Seems like some of you misunderstood me, probably my mistake, sorry about that. I'm not trying to convince anyone, I'm not trying to argue any point, I'm asking a question - to see if others' have similar experience or not. That's it, no claims to prove.
  - whyever 8y ago
    Are you saying all of this does not happen in paid colleges?
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      Not at all. Introducing a new reason for it to happen isn't going to help, though.
      - detaro 8y ago
        What is the new reason? I don't really have the impression that students paying fixes anything about the incentives for individuals in the system.
  - romwell 8y ago
    The problems you described aren't helped by making colleges not free. Specifically, > huge amount of money is wasted instead of used to help the students is arguably worse in the US - and it's the students' money.
  - simias 8y ago
    >EDIT: What about having a discussion instead of just downvoting? What about providing concrete examples and citations for your claims? How did you take a look inside exactly? What did you compare it to?
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      I did not compare it to anything. I was an IT employee at a faculty for a while. I can't cite since there isn't anything formal going on, it's just an observation and since I'm asking, I'm not going to support any argument, since I'm not arguing it's true - I'm just asking others if they have similar observations or not.
  - Y_Y 8y ago
    I don't think this is significantly different between European and American and universities. Your argument was probably downvoted because you didn't support your claim very well, and blaming everything on the invisible hand is not a popular dogma.
  - metafex 8y ago
    Can you specify which country or university your experience is based on? In my experience (Austria) there were issues sometimes, but nothing which would even by a long shot could be called "rampant". Here it is more of an issue that there is a lack of funding and not much political will to increase it. The amount of the GDP which goes to funding universities is lower than average recommended by the world bank [citation needed]. Edit: I couldn't find the recommendations but here is a chart by the world bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS The most recent data is from 2014 though, interesting nonetheless.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      I'm Czech, living in Czechia. I'm not going to say more, sorry - I'm not trying to convince anyone about my story, I am trying to collect more data, see if other people have similar experiences.
      - metafex 8y ago
        Thank you, that gives more context! It is just anecdotal and a few years back, but last time I spoke to students in Prague they didn't bring it up as there being that big issues. Is this something that changed in the last years or has it been that way for longer?
        Scea91 8y ago
        I am also Czech and do NOT have similar experience. I am very satisfied with the level of education I received and with the environment I was able to be part of at my university in Prague.
        TomMarius 8y ago
        Are you sure? If you've attended any of the top 3 universities, you just were shielded from it; generally IT/math/science related faculties work well, it's the social-related faculties where it works really badly, but still, you won't see it as a student. I'm happy to tell you more in private.
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    Try linking to evidence rather than making widespread assertions. You have three claims here; can you find URLs to reputable sources to back each of them up?
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Corruption is rampant (not in relation to academic results, but other things like employment, grants etc), favourism is flourishing, and huge amount of money is wasted instead of used to help the students. Sounds like SNAFU: Situation Normal -- All Fouled Up. Humans seem unable to escape favoritism, etc. The older I get, the less convinced I am that this is entirely bad. As I get healthier, I seem to get more "likeable." I find myself wondering exactly how much "I just like you" is actually some form of shorthand assessment. I don't know the answer. But I'm quite certain that where humans are involved, you can count on it being a morass. You can also count on some people objecting to something about it, even while others claim it is essentially perfect.
  - detaro 8y ago
    I don't have first-hand experience with US colleges, but you hear complaints about the same issues from there too. I'm not sure what about the power structure is actually different to dis-incentivize those, from what I see it's very similar? (I also wouldn't describe the places I've seen first-hand as strongly as you did, but those issues existed to some degree)
- whyever 8y ago
  After this beginning: > To millions of parents and students, they're magical words: free college. But is the idea pure fantasy? I had trouble to take the article seriously, given that it does not even mention the free colleges in other countries.
- sudoaza 8y ago
  And also in Latin America, at least in Argentina, in Chile they fuck you up with debt AFAIK
- MatthiasP 8y ago
  It works, but it is hardly the silver bullet for higher education HN wants it to be. The biggest problem is the lack of incentive for staff to deliver quality in teaching. Free college does not make the opportunity costs of bad and protracted education go away.
  - estomagordo 8y ago
    Why would American college staff be so hilariously bad, compared to European staff?
  - skh 8y ago
    I teach at a community college. Our funding per student has been declining for 15 years. We raise tuition as a result. We have become more like a business. We need students to pay the bills. Our focus is on passing students and retaining them. It’s all about passing rate. In such an environment standards go down. Instead of society and the ideal of knowledge being our client it is the student who is the client. I can no longer be a real teacher who gives real grades with real expectations. I need a job and this shift in focus is bad and degrades colleges.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      >Our funding per student has been declining for 15 years. We raise tuition as a result. We have become more like a business I thought the Obama administration did a lot to fund community colleges. Was that just all posturing and no actual substance?
      - skh 8y ago
        There was talk of making community college free but that never passed. It would likely have been tied to success rate as defined by the Department of Education. One pernicious stat is that we are judged by graduation rate. This means a student who comes to us for two years and transfers to a 4 year university but does not formally get an AA is counted as a failure on our part. My experience is that most of the metrics used are useless but well intentioned and increasingly funding and whatnot are starting to get tied to these metrics. I'll optimize to satisfy whatever my employment is based on. In the old days we just taught our classes and pretty much everyone was expected to have high standards. Not anymore.
- replicatorblog 8y ago
  Can anyone go to these free colleges in Europe? One of the problems in the US is that we assume that anyone should be able to go to college, so you have a bunch of non-selective schools that allow 50-90% of applicants to matriculate as long as they're able to pay. As I understand the European systems, there are high-stakes tests that determine who gets to go to these colleges. Is that incorrect?
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > Can anyone go to these free colleges in Europe? One of the problems in the US is that we assume that anyone should be able to go to college, so you have a bunch of non-selective schools that allow 50-90% of applicants to matriculate as long as they're able to pay. As I understand the European systems, there are high-stakes tests that determine who gets to go to these colleges. Is that incorrect? That is correct. The US has one of the highest rates of higher education (of European countries, only Luxembourg has a higher percentage of working-age adults with a university degree). They're also heavily stratified by race, though this is something which isn't discussed much in Europe (because talking about race is somewhere between taboo and outright illegal[0]). In the US, by contrast, there's much less of a racial divide in rates at which higher degrees are awarded. [0] several countries have prohibited collection of meaningful data on race and ethnicity for public universities
  - detaro 8y ago
    In Germany: ~ 40% meet the requirements to go to any university (for a long time this was primarily through finishing the Gymnasium, the higher-level high-school path, but nowadays it's half and half this vs other paths, most of which end with a big set of exams and an overall grade from those) additional ~ 10% meet the requirements for a "university of applied sciences" Universities are allowed to set a grade limit from the exams for individual majors if they'd be oversubscribed otherwise, with some adjustment for time spent waiting for a spot and other criteria chosen by the university (activities outside school, existing experience, introduction letter, some invite candidates for interviews, ...). If there's a limit like that or not is really mixed. E.g. at the university I studied at, some CS-related majors were limited, others weren't, chemistry, physics and mathematics were unrestricted but "bio sciences" was restricted, ... Some university institutes allow fairly heavy oversubscription and "solve" the problem by hard required exams in the first year - good for people with bad school grades but skill in the field, annoying for those that misjudged their skills. Changing majors isn't as common as it was as far as I know, but still something that happens quite a bit, especially early on. Medical fields are a special case and centrally managed, so you don't apply to an individual university but to a central authority (and give them some preferences where you'd like to study), with again a lot of priority given to grades. Private universities where students pay for classes exist too, but they're a niche thing.
sashimy 8y ago
This article made me realise the gap between France and the US, whereas free college is rare in the US, in France people are fighting and getting on strike so there isn't any selection in free universities.
keiferski 8y ago
I really don't understand this meme. Most of the non-Anglosphere developed world has free or very low-cost education. Typically they aren't full-inclusive luxury resorts like colleges in the U.S., but they do provide good educations for 95% of the population. The idea that the U.S., the single wealthiest country in the history of civilization, "can't afford" to make college affordable is just plain wrong. In fact, it was affordable until just a few decades ago. The only reason it isn't affordable now is because the profit motive has been introduced into a space where it doesn't belong.
- Swizec 8y ago
  Imagine how much college you could pay for if you curbed your half trillion dollar budget just a bit. But say that and people get upset.
- outime 8y ago
  And in fact, in many of these countries, private (paid) universities have quite bad popularity - it’s where people who can’t pass in the “free” one go, with very few exceptions. I mean, there are so many examples of fully or almost fully covered tuition around the world that it makes me wonder how such meme is still alive.
  - mszcz 8y ago
    I get the same feeling here in Poland. I attended a "free" university and one time I got to talking with one of the professors teaching AI about other schools, private colleges in particular. She said that she does a few classes there and the level is way lower than at the "free" university. She shared a felling she had that since the people there pay for the classes they expect the teachers to magically make the knowledge and skills appear in their heads instead of putting in the work themselves. The sentiment of paying for admission because you couldn't get in on merit alone was shared among a sizeable amount of my colleagues and other professors.
    - mcguire 8y ago
      What are the requirements to attend a public, "free" university in Poland? Or, what percent of applicants are accepted?
Swizec 8y ago
Where I come from (Slovenia) you only pay for college when your grades aren’t good enough to get in for real or you have to retake exams. Universities don’t even accept colleges that take tuition and people take your degree less seriously if you go to one of those. The perception is that paying tuition would misalign incentives and harm learning because how can a business fail a customer? Imagine taking 6 figures from someone and then saying “No, sorry, you flunk out” Works pretty well and yes I know we pay with taxes and that’s okay. That’s what taxes are for: public good.
- dylz 8y ago
  Can you explain a bit more about how the grade system works? College is generally equivalent to uni in the states.
  - Swizec 8y ago
    I might br mistranslating concepts. The idea is that you have a university, like NYU, which is comprised of colleges, like comp sci, economics etc. You go to your specific college, like major in something, and they count you as their student. You also apply to colleges specifically but are then also a student of the university. There are also independent colleges. Some of them are good enough that they eventually get accepted into a university. Some aren’t. Sometimes the university itself founds a new college like a new major and builds it up. Like when I studied CompSci it had been some 10 years since it became its own college, but was still physically hosted by the college of electronics and the college of mathematics. It first became a course within those some time in the 80s. Nowadays it has its own buildings and stuff. At the same time there was a multimedia college founded around the time I went to uni. Features video and stuff but also a lot of web development. They were not allowed to join the university and take tuition (I think government only funds universities). Uou can get a college degree in webdev, but not a university degree in webdev. So it’s more like a post high school vocational education. I believe in broad strokes we have the german education system if that helps.
    - wink 8y ago
      I think you're using the college in the UK sense and dylz meant "college as in undergraduate study institution, where you get your first degree". but I might be wrong. Also I've hardly heard of independent institutions joining universities here in Germany. Maybe you thought of the Hasso Plattner Institute "HPI was founded in 1998 and is the first, and as of 2018 the only entirely privately funded faculty[3] in Germany." So the University of Potsdam has a private IT faculty.
noobermin 8y ago
It would help if people read the article. This has nothing to do with social democratic calls for government provided universal college, it's about scholarship and grant programs sold as "free college" subsidies in various states in the US and how they all sort of fall short of being "free" or being "college".
- gota 8y ago
  Some countries have both systems. A network of public-funded universities, in which admission is controlled via standardized tests, plus private ones, in which the government subsidizes the monthly fees of many students in several ways. And both work to a satisfactory level. I'm particularly grateful of how I've been actually paid to study for the majority of my two Bachelors, my Masters and now my Doctorate. Not a lot, and without all the rights of a salaried worker, but still. The difference between debt and a small net gain (even though you may still require assistance from your family) is astounding for your mental health. Edit: just an addendum, and it might be particular to my country. Some of these private institutions are very renowned, specially regarding post-graduate courses. However, the public universities are typically considered to be the 'best' ones. As far as I can tell, the entrance exams serve as a filter of o high-quality candidates (or at least that's the consensus among professors). Another factor is that private universities have a higher share of undergraduate students that work concurrently, which impacts their performance. In any case, the relation cost (to the individual)-quality is not observable.
- jefftk 8y ago
  They have a summary chart: https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/free-college-comparison-20180905/child.html https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/free-college-com... It seems overly strict. For example, Maryland, Indiana, and Washington cover living costs and fees in addition to tuition for 4-year colleges, but they count it as not being "free college" because you can't use it to enroll half-time or as an adult.
  - noobermin 8y ago
    I do somewhat agree, especially for the half-time, there is a discontinuous change in the amount of value of this program if it doesn't cover 4 years vs. it not covering living costs. It probably doesn't solve everything but it's much better than the lot most people in the US have with respect to college access.
skh 8y ago
My dad and his two older brothers fought in World War 2 for the U.S. They grew up poor during the Depression. After the war all three of them went to college for free as part of the GI benefits. The three of them went on to have good careers and lived well. The two younger brothers did not go to war. They were not able to go to college. They ended up poorer and died younger than the older brothers. They did not prosper nearly as well as the three older brothers. We call the World War 2 generation the greatest ever. I think they were the greatest generation because they ended up with the greatest opportunities not because they were more special than other generations. Government that cares for its people and seeks to create a fair society is what creates great generations. Universal access to healthcare that is free at the point of service and universal access to higher education for those who are qualified are not too expensive. It just requires a shift in priorities.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  You might be right about universal healthcare, etc., but the reason people call it the greatest generation is because it recovered from the worst economic depression in economic history and saved the free world. > In the book, Brokaw wrote, "it is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced". He argued that these men and women fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was the "right thing to do". That title doesn't have to do with their post-war fortunes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Generation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Generation
  - skh 8y ago
    Yes, I know this is the reason. My experience with the people from that generation is that there was nothing special as such with them. They ended up having the greatest opportunities due to GI Bill and other programs. My dad didn't join up because it was the right thing to do. Neither did his brothers. They joined because they got drafted and at that time, at that age, if you were a guy and not in the military there was a lot of social pressure put on it. Like, "What is your excuse?" The title partially has to do with post war fortunes because of the great economic expansion that occurred after the war. That generation did build great things and greatly enhanced the way of life of the nation. I think this came from the opportunity government gave them and not from being innately special. By the way, they didn't save the free world. The vast majority of the fighting and killing in the ETO was done by the Soviet Union. They are the ones who won the war. The British and Americans helped but did not do the bulk of the fighting.
Dowwie 8y ago
Free college in the US will amount to wasted taxes unless the programs are highly competitive. Otherwise, if a state managed to arrange an associate's degree program paid by taxes, the programs would teach that which should have already been taught in high school. These college programs aren't college. They're the 13th and 14th grade.
- estomagordo 8y ago
  Care to explain why?
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    The course "College Algebra" has the highest fail rate among all university courses in the US; this course covers roughly what you already should've seen in high school. A lot of time is spent e.g. practicing arithmetic, plotting polynomials, solving linear equations, and so on. See this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:College_Mathematics:_Algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:College_Mathematics:_Alge... For many students, this is the only mathematics course they take for their degree and they fail/drop multiple times before finally succeeding. For those students, their mathematics course in college is quite literally a repeat of high school. It's worth noting that many colleges have even more remedial mathematics courses, which (no joke) cover elementary school stuff. E.g. the standard algorithm for division... So in some sense I would agree with Dowwie's concern, but also point out that we already have this problem anyways, so there isn't much to lose.
    - estomagordo 8y ago
      I'm sorry, but I fail to see how this relates to what dowwie wrote.
      - throwawayjava 8y ago
        He said: >> if a state managed to arrange an associate's degree program paid by taxes, the programs would teach that which should have already been taught in high school. These college programs aren't college. Emphasis added. I provided a concrete example of where this is already happening in higher ed: the mathematics course that a huge percentage of students take in college are covering material that's supposed to be covered in high school.
__d 8y ago
From the mid 70's until the late 80's, Australia's university education (tuition) was free. In the late 80's, a scheme was introduced whereby degrees were assigned to a number of bands based on your likely income as a result of that degree. At the time, IIRC, medicine and law were in the top band, while eg. philosophy was in the lowest band. Each band had an annual price for enrollment, but they were iirc, $2500, $3500, and $4500 in maybe 1988 or 1989. You paid nothing during your studies, but once your taxable income exceeded a threshold, you paid an additional couple of percent on your income tax until the accumulated debt from your education was repaid. This was part of the income tax withheld for most salary earners, and so was largely invisible. In addition to that, students enrolled in a recognized educational institution get an allowance for living costs. In the 80's and 90's, this was sufficient to live on (food, rent) and you could earn enough extra income to get a social life and textbooks and so on without losing your allowance. Healthcare is basically gratis in Australia too, so it was quite feasible to attend university with a small amount of part-time work with limited or even no financial support from your family. Over the last 30 years, the repayment percentage has increased, the starting threshold has gone down, the annual fees have gone up, and the weekly allowance hasn't kept pace with the cost of living. But ... Even without going to the "extreme" of genuinely gratis tuition, there's plenty of precedent for a system which gives everyone a decent opportunity for education regardless of their financial circumstances.
- Retric 8y ago
  It seems backward in that you charge less money for lower paying degrees independent of what someone actually makes.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    That would just incentivize people to pile onto the perceived high value programs like when everyone got into CS during the first dotcom bubble. Not a fitting solution for an institution intended to develop capable members of society rather than just making money.
    - DesiLurker 8y ago
ggm 8y ago
The end of grant aided study was introduced to the UK from Australia. One of the worst exports we ever gave the world. Scotland, bless them, ignored it. And, the generation of politicians in Australia who introduced it? Got free university education to a man (and I do mean man) Bastards. (I write, as a recipient of a UK grant funded degree in the 1980s)
assblaster 8y ago
Here's a simple fix for free college: Online-only courses that everyone in the United States can get into regardless of ability (no admission department). Standardized exams with rigid grading criteria (no need for TAs to grade). Lectures are recorded once, so it's only a one-time fee paid to a professor. No athletics department. No dorms. No campus. No clinic. There's your free college education. If you want your sports and luxury dorms and catered meals, then you gotta pay for it.
- assblaster 8y ago
  This can easily be provided by the federal government. The costs are miniscule. The best part: it's easy to recruit the best talent for providing the lectures because you'll be the face of a specific subject for many years, and being features as THE expert teacher, your side gigs get huge exposure: books, articles, commentary, etc. You can even get recurring income by addressing questions in follow up videos. It's like Khan academy but at the national level, and this time it's for keeps (aka it counts for education credits).
- mcguire 8y ago
  No interaction with your instructors. No questions answered, no updates. No essays, no writing requirement. In fact, no specialized grading is possible. There's only limited curricula that can be satisfied by multiple-choice grading. Presumably it would have the same work requirements as a traditional class: ~3 hours of lecture / week, ~15 weeks, plus an additional 3-6 (?) hours of reading and exercises per week = 90-150 hours of work. My degree required >= 120 credit hours, so overall that would be 3600-5400 hours of work. Going to do that in your spare time while you wait tables or clerk a convenience store?
  - assblaster 8y ago
    Why does college education need such a rapid pace? With self learning, you would be able to view lectures on your own schedule. Why wait tables or clerk when you can live at home with your parent and spend your time doing class activities? The education is free, so what's the extra income needed for? You don't need essays to assess understanding of material. My education was evaluated with 99% standardized testing. You don't need interaction with professors if your questions were answered by a FAQ.
mr_tristan 8y ago
What concerns me is how the US college system created a market where colleges have been without price controls for a long time. These grant mechanisms seem like another way to just give colleges the ability to crank up fees and drive up prices. Effectively, the "solutions" seem to take the guaranteed loans the students have to pay and making the public pay for it. Have there been any other systems that have successfully converted out of such a out-of-control market without direct price controls from a central authority?
- pitaj 8y ago
  Guaranteed student loans did most of the damage. If we stopped doing that, prices would almost immediately fall to reasonable levels.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    That may fix prices, but doesn't fix the problem of giving a wide swath of a nation's population the opportunity to attend college.
    - jimbokun 8y ago
      The solution for that is bringing the state college systems back to life, with only token fees low enough so anyone who gets admitted can attend without a serious financial burden.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > That may fix prices, but doesn't fix the problem of giving a wide swath of a nation's population the opportunity to attend college. No country has really figured out how to solve both of those problems simultaneously on a large scale. The US has high prices, but also one of the highest rates of higher education in the developed world. In addition, it also has provided people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds not just with the theoretical opportunity to earn a degree, but with the tools needed to actually deliver on that in practice. For all the faults of the US educational system (especially at the primary and secondary level), it performs much better than its European counterparts on this criterion if you look at the actual rates of degrees granted.
sntax 8y ago
I am aware that this is not what the NPR article is about but, can someone please change my mind on this? The vast majority of college degrees in the US do not have a return on investment. Many people are struggling because they studied information that is not a marketable skill from a university that accepts low-quality students. Why is the solution that the nation just foots the bill to make a bad investment instead of the individual?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Why is the solution that the nation just foots the bill to make a bad investment instead of the individual? Almost the only economic reason in a rational choice model [0] for a public program is the existence of externalities that justify action that would not occur in a market system without government intervention to internalize the externalities; in this case, that would be diffuse social benefit that offsets the negative expected financial return to the student if they paid full price in the market. Of course assessing the existence and, particularly, value of such externalities is, in practice highly subjective. [0] which is known to be inaccurate, and real-world irrationality may provide additional reasons.
- drngdds 8y ago
  Even people who get degrees with good employment rates go into a ton of debt (by non-American standards) for them unless they have a scholarship.
  - sntax 8y ago
    I don't understand your point here. If your degree has a return on investment it means that you can pay back your loans because you have a higher paying job that was a direct result of your degree. You will go into a ton of debt to become a nurse but you will make up your investment in salary eventually. If you spend 100k dollars on an art history degree from Univ. of South Carolina Aiken your job prospects have not changed from someone who never attended college at all.
- zumu 8y ago
  Well there's the argument that it educates the citizenry and thus strengthens our democracy.
nimbius 8y ago
disclosure: I never went to college. I was a C student in highschool. I started studying 15 years ago to be an engine mechanic. I apprenticed with an occupational outlet in my state that paired me up with an 'old-timer' named Simon. I was paid a regular wage to simply show up, and pay close attention and learn. for the first year or two i had no major responsibilities outside of oil changes or other pretty rote things. Finally one day I had the responsibility to do a major overhaul on a large diesel generator on a job site. I showed up, and Simon handed me a sheet of customer specifications and rework specs. I didnt realize until lunchtime that I had been crawling all over that engine for 4 hours, doing all the work myself. Every individual thing I did was part of what I'd learned, and I did it without so much as a second thought. I did it to Union spec, and I was troubleshooting real problems. When the time came, I signed off on the work that day and certified as a master mechanic that week. I guess what im getting at, is that at no time was there a question about my education, or my pay. Why is college different? How is it different? Why are there so many shady players?
- slededit 8y ago
  I think the main difference is that in University your assignments have negative economic value. Even doing an oil change is beneficial work to the company, but in University you need to pay a TA to spend time grading your essay which has zero value.
djrogers 8y ago
I’ve got a big problem with this item: — Helps low-income students cover living expenses and covers fees in addition to tuition: "[Students] have to eat. They have to have shelter. They have to buy books," says Tiffany Jones, director of higher education policy at The Education Trust. "If a politician is selling a program saying, 'I'm making college free,' and they're not dealing with any of that stuff except for tuition, that can be really problematic." — Plenty of people work their way through college, and with the burden reduced to room and board, waiting tables a few nights a week often does the trick.

90 points by swebs 8y ago

Ah, nothing as elaborate as the propaganda of a creature fearing for its feast. The more interesting question. Is the difference in quality between us and European free colleges worth the cost. Or is this another public sector crawling with lets-play-free-market-parasites like the US medical sector?

Yoric 8y ago

For what it's worth, Free College works pretty well in most of Europe.

TomMarius 8y ago
Does it? I got a chance to take a look inside and I'm no longer sure about it. Corruption is rampant (not in relation to academic results, but other things like employment, grants etc), favourism is flourishing, and huge amount of money is wasted instead of used to help the students. I personally blame the lack of monetary incentives. EDIT: What about having a discussion instead of just downvoting? I presented my observation and expected to talk about it, downvoting isn't helping anyone and my comment is on topic. EDIT2: Seems like some of you misunderstood me, probably my mistake, sorry about that. I'm not trying to convince anyone, I'm not trying to argue any point, I'm asking a question - to see if others' have similar experience or not. That's it, no claims to prove.
- whyever 8y ago
  Are you saying all of this does not happen in paid colleges?
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Not at all. Introducing a new reason for it to happen isn't going to help, though.
    - detaro 8y ago
      What is the new reason? I don't really have the impression that students paying fixes anything about the incentives for individuals in the system.
- romwell 8y ago
  The problems you described aren't helped by making colleges not free. Specifically, > huge amount of money is wasted instead of used to help the students is arguably worse in the US - and it's the students' money.
- simias 8y ago
  >EDIT: What about having a discussion instead of just downvoting? What about providing concrete examples and citations for your claims? How did you take a look inside exactly? What did you compare it to?
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    I did not compare it to anything. I was an IT employee at a faculty for a while. I can't cite since there isn't anything formal going on, it's just an observation and since I'm asking, I'm not going to support any argument, since I'm not arguing it's true - I'm just asking others if they have similar observations or not.
- Y_Y 8y ago
  I don't think this is significantly different between European and American and universities. Your argument was probably downvoted because you didn't support your claim very well, and blaming everything on the invisible hand is not a popular dogma.
- metafex 8y ago
  Can you specify which country or university your experience is based on? In my experience (Austria) there were issues sometimes, but nothing which would even by a long shot could be called "rampant". Here it is more of an issue that there is a lack of funding and not much political will to increase it. The amount of the GDP which goes to funding universities is lower than average recommended by the world bank [citation needed]. Edit: I couldn't find the recommendations but here is a chart by the world bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS The most recent data is from 2014 though, interesting nonetheless.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    I'm Czech, living in Czechia. I'm not going to say more, sorry - I'm not trying to convince anyone about my story, I am trying to collect more data, see if other people have similar experiences.
    - metafex 8y ago
      Thank you, that gives more context! It is just anecdotal and a few years back, but last time I spoke to students in Prague they didn't bring it up as there being that big issues. Is this something that changed in the last years or has it been that way for longer?
      - Scea91 8y ago
        I am also Czech and do NOT have similar experience. I am very satisfied with the level of education I received and with the environment I was able to be part of at my university in Prague.
        TomMarius 8y ago
        Are you sure? If you've attended any of the top 3 universities, you just were shielded from it; generally IT/math/science related faculties work well, it's the social-related faculties where it works really badly, but still, you won't see it as a student. I'm happy to tell you more in private.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Try linking to evidence rather than making widespread assertions. You have three claims here; can you find URLs to reputable sources to back each of them up?
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Corruption is rampant (not in relation to academic results, but other things like employment, grants etc), favourism is flourishing, and huge amount of money is wasted instead of used to help the students. Sounds like SNAFU: Situation Normal -- All Fouled Up. Humans seem unable to escape favoritism, etc. The older I get, the less convinced I am that this is entirely bad. As I get healthier, I seem to get more "likeable." I find myself wondering exactly how much "I just like you" is actually some form of shorthand assessment. I don't know the answer. But I'm quite certain that where humans are involved, you can count on it being a morass. You can also count on some people objecting to something about it, even while others claim it is essentially perfect.
- detaro 8y ago
  I don't have first-hand experience with US colleges, but you hear complaints about the same issues from there too. I'm not sure what about the power structure is actually different to dis-incentivize those, from what I see it's very similar? (I also wouldn't describe the places I've seen first-hand as strongly as you did, but those issues existed to some degree)
whyever 8y ago
After this beginning: > To millions of parents and students, they're magical words: free college. But is the idea pure fantasy? I had trouble to take the article seriously, given that it does not even mention the free colleges in other countries.
sudoaza 8y ago
And also in Latin America, at least in Argentina, in Chile they fuck you up with debt AFAIK
MatthiasP 8y ago
It works, but it is hardly the silver bullet for higher education HN wants it to be. The biggest problem is the lack of incentive for staff to deliver quality in teaching. Free college does not make the opportunity costs of bad and protracted education go away.
- estomagordo 8y ago
  Why would American college staff be so hilariously bad, compared to European staff?
- skh 8y ago
  I teach at a community college. Our funding per student has been declining for 15 years. We raise tuition as a result. We have become more like a business. We need students to pay the bills. Our focus is on passing students and retaining them. It’s all about passing rate. In such an environment standards go down. Instead of society and the ideal of knowledge being our client it is the student who is the client. I can no longer be a real teacher who gives real grades with real expectations. I need a job and this shift in focus is bad and degrades colleges.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Our funding per student has been declining for 15 years. We raise tuition as a result. We have become more like a business I thought the Obama administration did a lot to fund community colleges. Was that just all posturing and no actual substance?
    - skh 8y ago
      There was talk of making community college free but that never passed. It would likely have been tied to success rate as defined by the Department of Education. One pernicious stat is that we are judged by graduation rate. This means a student who comes to us for two years and transfers to a 4 year university but does not formally get an AA is counted as a failure on our part. My experience is that most of the metrics used are useless but well intentioned and increasingly funding and whatnot are starting to get tied to these metrics. I'll optimize to satisfy whatever my employment is based on. In the old days we just taught our classes and pretty much everyone was expected to have high standards. Not anymore.
replicatorblog 8y ago
Can anyone go to these free colleges in Europe? One of the problems in the US is that we assume that anyone should be able to go to college, so you have a bunch of non-selective schools that allow 50-90% of applicants to matriculate as long as they're able to pay. As I understand the European systems, there are high-stakes tests that determine who gets to go to these colleges. Is that incorrect?
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > Can anyone go to these free colleges in Europe? One of the problems in the US is that we assume that anyone should be able to go to college, so you have a bunch of non-selective schools that allow 50-90% of applicants to matriculate as long as they're able to pay. As I understand the European systems, there are high-stakes tests that determine who gets to go to these colleges. Is that incorrect? That is correct. The US has one of the highest rates of higher education (of European countries, only Luxembourg has a higher percentage of working-age adults with a university degree). They're also heavily stratified by race, though this is something which isn't discussed much in Europe (because talking about race is somewhere between taboo and outright illegal[0]). In the US, by contrast, there's much less of a racial divide in rates at which higher degrees are awarded. [0] several countries have prohibited collection of meaningful data on race and ethnicity for public universities
- detaro 8y ago
  In Germany: ~ 40% meet the requirements to go to any university (for a long time this was primarily through finishing the Gymnasium, the higher-level high-school path, but nowadays it's half and half this vs other paths, most of which end with a big set of exams and an overall grade from those) additional ~ 10% meet the requirements for a "university of applied sciences" Universities are allowed to set a grade limit from the exams for individual majors if they'd be oversubscribed otherwise, with some adjustment for time spent waiting for a spot and other criteria chosen by the university (activities outside school, existing experience, introduction letter, some invite candidates for interviews, ...). If there's a limit like that or not is really mixed. E.g. at the university I studied at, some CS-related majors were limited, others weren't, chemistry, physics and mathematics were unrestricted but "bio sciences" was restricted, ... Some university institutes allow fairly heavy oversubscription and "solve" the problem by hard required exams in the first year - good for people with bad school grades but skill in the field, annoying for those that misjudged their skills. Changing majors isn't as common as it was as far as I know, but still something that happens quite a bit, especially early on. Medical fields are a special case and centrally managed, so you don't apply to an individual university but to a central authority (and give them some preferences where you'd like to study), with again a lot of priority given to grades. Private universities where students pay for classes exist too, but they're a niche thing.

sashimy 8y ago

This article made me realise the gap between France and the US, whereas free college is rare in the US, in France people are fighting and getting on strike so there isn't any selection in free universities.

keiferski 8y ago

I really don't understand this meme. Most of the non-Anglosphere developed world has free or very low-cost education. Typically they aren't full-inclusive luxury resorts like colleges in the U.S., but they do provide good educations for 95% of the population. The idea that the U.S., the single wealthiest country in the history of civilization, "can't afford" to make college affordable is just plain wrong. In fact, it was affordable until just a few decades ago. The only reason it isn't affordable now is because the profit motive has been introduced into a space where it doesn't belong.

Swizec 8y ago
Imagine how much college you could pay for if you curbed your half trillion dollar budget just a bit. But say that and people get upset.
outime 8y ago
And in fact, in many of these countries, private (paid) universities have quite bad popularity - it’s where people who can’t pass in the “free” one go, with very few exceptions. I mean, there are so many examples of fully or almost fully covered tuition around the world that it makes me wonder how such meme is still alive.
- mszcz 8y ago
  I get the same feeling here in Poland. I attended a "free" university and one time I got to talking with one of the professors teaching AI about other schools, private colleges in particular. She said that she does a few classes there and the level is way lower than at the "free" university. She shared a felling she had that since the people there pay for the classes they expect the teachers to magically make the knowledge and skills appear in their heads instead of putting in the work themselves. The sentiment of paying for admission because you couldn't get in on merit alone was shared among a sizeable amount of my colleagues and other professors.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    What are the requirements to attend a public, "free" university in Poland? Or, what percent of applicants are accepted?

Swizec 8y ago

Where I come from (Slovenia) you only pay for college when your grades aren’t good enough to get in for real or you have to retake exams. Universities don’t even accept colleges that take tuition and people take your degree less seriously if you go to one of those. The perception is that paying tuition would misalign incentives and harm learning because how can a business fail a customer? Imagine taking 6 figures from someone and then saying “No, sorry, you flunk out” Works pretty well and yes I know we pay with taxes and that’s okay. That’s what taxes are for: public good.

dylz 8y ago
Can you explain a bit more about how the grade system works? College is generally equivalent to uni in the states.
- Swizec 8y ago
  I might br mistranslating concepts. The idea is that you have a university, like NYU, which is comprised of colleges, like comp sci, economics etc. You go to your specific college, like major in something, and they count you as their student. You also apply to colleges specifically but are then also a student of the university. There are also independent colleges. Some of them are good enough that they eventually get accepted into a university. Some aren’t. Sometimes the university itself founds a new college like a new major and builds it up. Like when I studied CompSci it had been some 10 years since it became its own college, but was still physically hosted by the college of electronics and the college of mathematics. It first became a course within those some time in the 80s. Nowadays it has its own buildings and stuff. At the same time there was a multimedia college founded around the time I went to uni. Features video and stuff but also a lot of web development. They were not allowed to join the university and take tuition (I think government only funds universities). Uou can get a college degree in webdev, but not a university degree in webdev. So it’s more like a post high school vocational education. I believe in broad strokes we have the german education system if that helps.
  - wink 8y ago
    I think you're using the college in the UK sense and dylz meant "college as in undergraduate study institution, where you get your first degree". but I might be wrong. Also I've hardly heard of independent institutions joining universities here in Germany. Maybe you thought of the Hasso Plattner Institute "HPI was founded in 1998 and is the first, and as of 2018 the only entirely privately funded faculty[3] in Germany." So the University of Potsdam has a private IT faculty.

noobermin 8y ago

It would help if people read the article. This has nothing to do with social democratic calls for government provided universal college, it's about scholarship and grant programs sold as "free college" subsidies in various states in the US and how they all sort of fall short of being "free" or being "college".

gota 8y ago
Some countries have both systems. A network of public-funded universities, in which admission is controlled via standardized tests, plus private ones, in which the government subsidizes the monthly fees of many students in several ways. And both work to a satisfactory level. I'm particularly grateful of how I've been actually paid to study for the majority of my two Bachelors, my Masters and now my Doctorate. Not a lot, and without all the rights of a salaried worker, but still. The difference between debt and a small net gain (even though you may still require assistance from your family) is astounding for your mental health. Edit: just an addendum, and it might be particular to my country. Some of these private institutions are very renowned, specially regarding post-graduate courses. However, the public universities are typically considered to be the 'best' ones. As far as I can tell, the entrance exams serve as a filter of o high-quality candidates (or at least that's the consensus among professors). Another factor is that private universities have a higher share of undergraduate students that work concurrently, which impacts their performance. In any case, the relation cost (to the individual)-quality is not observable.
jefftk 8y ago
They have a summary chart: https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/free-college-comparison-20180905/child.html https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/free-college-com... It seems overly strict. For example, Maryland, Indiana, and Washington cover living costs and fees in addition to tuition for 4-year colleges, but they count it as not being "free college" because you can't use it to enroll half-time or as an adult.
- noobermin 8y ago
  I do somewhat agree, especially for the half-time, there is a discontinuous change in the amount of value of this program if it doesn't cover 4 years vs. it not covering living costs. It probably doesn't solve everything but it's much better than the lot most people in the US have with respect to college access.

skh 8y ago

My dad and his two older brothers fought in World War 2 for the U.S. They grew up poor during the Depression. After the war all three of them went to college for free as part of the GI benefits. The three of them went on to have good careers and lived well. The two younger brothers did not go to war. They were not able to go to college. They ended up poorer and died younger than the older brothers. They did not prosper nearly as well as the three older brothers. We call the World War 2 generation the greatest ever. I think they were the greatest generation because they ended up with the greatest opportunities not because they were more special than other generations. Government that cares for its people and seeks to create a fair society is what creates great generations. Universal access to healthcare that is free at the point of service and universal access to higher education for those who are qualified are not too expensive. It just requires a shift in priorities.

paulddraper 8y ago
You might be right about universal healthcare, etc., but the reason people call it the greatest generation is because it recovered from the worst economic depression in economic history and saved the free world. > In the book, Brokaw wrote, "it is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced". He argued that these men and women fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was the "right thing to do". That title doesn't have to do with their post-war fortunes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Generation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Generation
- skh 8y ago
  Yes, I know this is the reason. My experience with the people from that generation is that there was nothing special as such with them. They ended up having the greatest opportunities due to GI Bill and other programs. My dad didn't join up because it was the right thing to do. Neither did his brothers. They joined because they got drafted and at that time, at that age, if you were a guy and not in the military there was a lot of social pressure put on it. Like, "What is your excuse?" The title partially has to do with post war fortunes because of the great economic expansion that occurred after the war. That generation did build great things and greatly enhanced the way of life of the nation. I think this came from the opportunity government gave them and not from being innately special. By the way, they didn't save the free world. The vast majority of the fighting and killing in the ETO was done by the Soviet Union. They are the ones who won the war. The British and Americans helped but did not do the bulk of the fighting.

Dowwie 8y ago

Free college in the US will amount to wasted taxes unless the programs are highly competitive. Otherwise, if a state managed to arrange an associate's degree program paid by taxes, the programs would teach that which should have already been taught in high school. These college programs aren't college. They're the 13th and 14th grade.

estomagordo 8y ago
Care to explain why?
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  The course "College Algebra" has the highest fail rate among all university courses in the US; this course covers roughly what you already should've seen in high school. A lot of time is spent e.g. practicing arithmetic, plotting polynomials, solving linear equations, and so on. See this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:College_Mathematics:_Algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:College_Mathematics:_Alge... For many students, this is the only mathematics course they take for their degree and they fail/drop multiple times before finally succeeding. For those students, their mathematics course in college is quite literally a repeat of high school. It's worth noting that many colleges have even more remedial mathematics courses, which (no joke) cover elementary school stuff. E.g. the standard algorithm for division... So in some sense I would agree with Dowwie's concern, but also point out that we already have this problem anyways, so there isn't much to lose.
  - estomagordo 8y ago
    I'm sorry, but I fail to see how this relates to what dowwie wrote.
    - throwawayjava 8y ago
      He said: >> if a state managed to arrange an associate's degree program paid by taxes, the programs would teach that which should have already been taught in high school. These college programs aren't college. Emphasis added. I provided a concrete example of where this is already happening in higher ed: the mathematics course that a huge percentage of students take in college are covering material that's supposed to be covered in high school.

__d 8y ago

From the mid 70's until the late 80's, Australia's university education (tuition) was free. In the late 80's, a scheme was introduced whereby degrees were assigned to a number of bands based on your likely income as a result of that degree. At the time, IIRC, medicine and law were in the top band, while eg. philosophy was in the lowest band. Each band had an annual price for enrollment, but they were iirc, $2500, $3500, and $4500 in maybe 1988 or 1989. You paid nothing during your studies, but once your taxable income exceeded a threshold, you paid an additional couple of percent on your income tax until the accumulated debt from your education was repaid. This was part of the income tax withheld for most salary earners, and so was largely invisible. In addition to that, students enrolled in a recognized educational institution get an allowance for living costs. In the 80's and 90's, this was sufficient to live on (food, rent) and you could earn enough extra income to get a social life and textbooks and so on without losing your allowance. Healthcare is basically gratis in Australia too, so it was quite feasible to attend university with a small amount of part-time work with limited or even no financial support from your family. Over the last 30 years, the repayment percentage has increased, the starting threshold has gone down, the annual fees have gone up, and the weekly allowance hasn't kept pace with the cost of living. But ... Even without going to the "extreme" of genuinely gratis tuition, there's plenty of precedent for a system which gives everyone a decent opportunity for education regardless of their financial circumstances.

Retric 8y ago
It seems backward in that you charge less money for lower paying degrees independent of what someone actually makes.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  That would just incentivize people to pile onto the perceived high value programs like when everyone got into CS during the first dotcom bubble. Not a fitting solution for an institution intended to develop capable members of society rather than just making money.
  - DesiLurker 8y ago

ggm 8y ago

The end of grant aided study was introduced to the UK from Australia. One of the worst exports we ever gave the world. Scotland, bless them, ignored it. And, the generation of politicians in Australia who introduced it? Got free university education to a man (and I do mean man) Bastards. (I write, as a recipient of a UK grant funded degree in the 1980s)

assblaster 8y ago

Here's a simple fix for free college: Online-only courses that everyone in the United States can get into regardless of ability (no admission department). Standardized exams with rigid grading criteria (no need for TAs to grade). Lectures are recorded once, so it's only a one-time fee paid to a professor. No athletics department. No dorms. No campus. No clinic. There's your free college education. If you want your sports and luxury dorms and catered meals, then you gotta pay for it.

assblaster 8y ago
This can easily be provided by the federal government. The costs are miniscule. The best part: it's easy to recruit the best talent for providing the lectures because you'll be the face of a specific subject for many years, and being features as THE expert teacher, your side gigs get huge exposure: books, articles, commentary, etc. You can even get recurring income by addressing questions in follow up videos. It's like Khan academy but at the national level, and this time it's for keeps (aka it counts for education credits).
mcguire 8y ago
No interaction with your instructors. No questions answered, no updates. No essays, no writing requirement. In fact, no specialized grading is possible. There's only limited curricula that can be satisfied by multiple-choice grading. Presumably it would have the same work requirements as a traditional class: ~3 hours of lecture / week, ~15 weeks, plus an additional 3-6 (?) hours of reading and exercises per week = 90-150 hours of work. My degree required >= 120 credit hours, so overall that would be 3600-5400 hours of work. Going to do that in your spare time while you wait tables or clerk a convenience store?
- assblaster 8y ago
  Why does college education need such a rapid pace? With self learning, you would be able to view lectures on your own schedule. Why wait tables or clerk when you can live at home with your parent and spend your time doing class activities? The education is free, so what's the extra income needed for? You don't need essays to assess understanding of material. My education was evaluated with 99% standardized testing. You don't need interaction with professors if your questions were answered by a FAQ.

mr_tristan 8y ago

What concerns me is how the US college system created a market where colleges have been without price controls for a long time. These grant mechanisms seem like another way to just give colleges the ability to crank up fees and drive up prices. Effectively, the "solutions" seem to take the guaranteed loans the students have to pay and making the public pay for it. Have there been any other systems that have successfully converted out of such a out-of-control market without direct price controls from a central authority?

pitaj 8y ago
Guaranteed student loans did most of the damage. If we stopped doing that, prices would almost immediately fall to reasonable levels.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  That may fix prices, but doesn't fix the problem of giving a wide swath of a nation's population the opportunity to attend college.
  - jimbokun 8y ago
    The solution for that is bringing the state college systems back to life, with only token fees low enough so anyone who gets admitted can attend without a serious financial burden.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > That may fix prices, but doesn't fix the problem of giving a wide swath of a nation's population the opportunity to attend college. No country has really figured out how to solve both of those problems simultaneously on a large scale. The US has high prices, but also one of the highest rates of higher education in the developed world. In addition, it also has provided people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds not just with the theoretical opportunity to earn a degree, but with the tools needed to actually deliver on that in practice. For all the faults of the US educational system (especially at the primary and secondary level), it performs much better than its European counterparts on this criterion if you look at the actual rates of degrees granted.

sntax 8y ago

I am aware that this is not what the NPR article is about but, can someone please change my mind on this? The vast majority of college degrees in the US do not have a return on investment. Many people are struggling because they studied information that is not a marketable skill from a university that accepts low-quality students. Why is the solution that the nation just foots the bill to make a bad investment instead of the individual?

dragonwriter 8y ago
> Why is the solution that the nation just foots the bill to make a bad investment instead of the individual? Almost the only economic reason in a rational choice model [0] for a public program is the existence of externalities that justify action that would not occur in a market system without government intervention to internalize the externalities; in this case, that would be diffuse social benefit that offsets the negative expected financial return to the student if they paid full price in the market. Of course assessing the existence and, particularly, value of such externalities is, in practice highly subjective. [0] which is known to be inaccurate, and real-world irrationality may provide additional reasons.
drngdds 8y ago
Even people who get degrees with good employment rates go into a ton of debt (by non-American standards) for them unless they have a scholarship.
- sntax 8y ago
  I don't understand your point here. If your degree has a return on investment it means that you can pay back your loans because you have a higher paying job that was a direct result of your degree. You will go into a ton of debt to become a nurse but you will make up your investment in salary eventually. If you spend 100k dollars on an art history degree from Univ. of South Carolina Aiken your job prospects have not changed from someone who never attended college at all.
zumu 8y ago
Well there's the argument that it educates the citizenry and thus strengthens our democracy.

nimbius 8y ago

disclosure: I never went to college. I was a C student in highschool. I started studying 15 years ago to be an engine mechanic. I apprenticed with an occupational outlet in my state that paired me up with an 'old-timer' named Simon. I was paid a regular wage to simply show up, and pay close attention and learn. for the first year or two i had no major responsibilities outside of oil changes or other pretty rote things. Finally one day I had the responsibility to do a major overhaul on a large diesel generator on a job site. I showed up, and Simon handed me a sheet of customer specifications and rework specs. I didnt realize until lunchtime that I had been crawling all over that engine for 4 hours, doing all the work myself. Every individual thing I did was part of what I'd learned, and I did it without so much as a second thought. I did it to Union spec, and I was troubleshooting real problems. When the time came, I signed off on the work that day and certified as a master mechanic that week. I guess what im getting at, is that at no time was there a question about my education, or my pay. Why is college different? How is it different? Why are there so many shady players?

slededit 8y ago
I think the main difference is that in University your assignments have negative economic value. Even doing an oil change is beneficial work to the company, but in University you need to pay a TA to spend time grading your essay which has zero value.

djrogers 8y ago

I’ve got a big problem with this item: — Helps low-income students cover living expenses and covers fees in addition to tuition: "[Students] have to eat. They have to have shelter. They have to buy books," says Tiffany Jones, director of higher education policy at The Education Trust. "If a politician is selling a program saying, 'I'm making college free,' and they're not dealing with any of that stuff except for tuition, that can be really problematic." — Plenty of people work their way through college, and with the burden reduced to room and board, waiting tables a few nights a week often does the trick.