4 ms·

Higher education should be free! Then the 'return on investment' issue would not be as serious

• jamesbritt 16y ago
  "Higher education should be free!" Do you mean no one should be paid to provide it?
  • z0r 16y ago
    Society should pay for it, since society will benefit from it.
    • jdminhbg 16y ago
      Society doesn't seem to be benefiting from it right now if it's employing grads as waiters and bartenders.
    • RyanMcGreal 16y ago
      Education is a positive externality, i.e. the economy as a whole benefits as well as the individual receiving the education. In a free market, individuals tend to under-invest in education and the overall economy misses out on a higher aggregate education level.
    • jamesbritt 16y ago
      "Society should pay for it, since society will benefit from it." OK, but if someone is paying for it then it's not free. Whether "society" (whihc I'm guessing really means tax payers) should foot the bill is a different matter. There's a good self-interest argument that one is better off in a society where more people are better educated, but the devil is in the details: Who gets funding, with what strings attached, and so on.
  • todayiamme 16y ago
    You know if you set up research based institutes that actively encourage spin offs based upon the knowledge generated and gained inside their walls. Then, this problem won't exist. For example, if I start a company/business the school will help me out with resources and in return take some amount of equity. Thus, what happens is that you have a VC-esque institution that remains true to the objectives of a university; learning.
• sp4rki 16y ago
  Education itself is cheap enough, you're not buying education by going to an expensive University, you're buying social interaction and a piece of paper. If the benefits of networking at Ivy League schools and the prestige of a diploma were available to everyone, they would cease to matter. "you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library"
• cullenking 16y ago
  "Not with my tax dollars!"
• patio11 16y ago
  That shifts the pocket the wasted money comes from, but does not unwaste the money. It also possibly exacerbates the problem, since it creates a moral hazard in that the student can pick a degree known to be non-renumerative but otherwise desirable ("I always wanted to study anime... and now I can!"+), and the rest of us get to foot the bill for it. + In addition to my degree in making stuff, I have a degree in making stuff up, and one course was literally Manga As Literature. Nothing wrong with studying it on the side, but I know people who literally designed a course of study to focus on it, and the options for being a professional anime geek are rather constrained (particularly, cough, if you drop out of Japanese because "it is too hard").
  • z0r 16y ago
    I think most education is not wasted - your example is not unheard of, but relatively uncommon. I think most people would complain about tax dollars paying for useless "arts majors". I think it is in general always better for society to have more highly educated populace, and it is no good to look down our noses at anything that isn't math, engineering, and science.
• clistctrl 16y ago
  I think this is a great idea, and I'd pay more taxes for it right away! but there needs to be limits around it. I'm more than willing to have my tax dollars go to help Little Timmy go to school for engineering (actually in the end that would benefit me twice, once as a consumer, and anther as an employer) however I would hate to pay taxes so little Timmy can learn more about art history, then get into the working world and make swirl pictures in my coffee.