7 ms·

This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric from Elizabeth Warren and the like... The underlying problem is the giant wealth transfer to college

This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric from Elizabeth Warren and the like... The underlying problem is the giant wealth transfer to colleges, and the progressive fixes seem to be to transfer even more wealth to them.

dd36 7y ago
Or to do exactly as the OP said: this is what we’ll pay per student.
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  Is this what is being proposed though? I agree with this approach, but I haven't seen the proposals being framed this way.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  School vouchers. Still bad for college: why give free money to the richest of society?
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    it's not really giving them free money when they've already paid way more than the value of a single voucher in taxes that year.
  - ndiscussion 7y ago
    Because they will stay in our country and help us develop the most productive economy on earth. imo.
    - conanbatt 7y ago
      Thats usually critiqued as "trickle down economics", curiously by the same group that advocates free college.
  - dd36 7y ago
    Because relatively speaking, there’s not that many of them and it’s only fair. The rich get Medicare, right?
    - conanbatt 7y ago
      Medicare definitely has regressive components to it. But I don't know enough about the aggregates to make a conclusion.
jimmaswell 7y ago
Free college works just fine elsewhere.
- ngngngng 7y ago
  Yes, but do other places have the complication of having to replace systems that are sucking billions of dollars out of students to line the pockets of university presidents? This is what makes me skeptical. A solution in the United States for our education, healthcare, or other problems has to involve removing the leeches from the system. But political bribery is legal in the US, and the leeches have more than enough money to bribe the politicians. So insurance companies will keep existing. University presidents will keep taking home 7 figures. Turbotax won't go away anytime soon. You can either find a way to suck money away from the vulnerable, or you can be poor.
  - Elv13 7y ago
    Canada did switch from "for profit" health care to universal one in the 60's. Of course the doctors were furious, but it worked, eventually. Same thing for electricity in Quebec in the 40's. Same thing from prying the education system out of the church hands in the 60's. In all the case of electricity, it is hugely profitable for the government and used to balance the budget. I went to university and turned a good profit working part time as a programmer (while paying everything and having an apartment). My University had a balanced budget too and grew over 50% since I graduated. Hospitals are as good as anywhere else. They spend billions building them and replace the older facility as they become obsolete. Yet the cost are totally under control. Public infrastructure work as long as the bureaucracy is kept in check and corruption is managed properly. Inefficiencies and corruption is unavoidable, but at least the slippery slope of "on purpose" waste like US Universities is avoided. edit: typo
    - tastygreenapple 7y ago
      Unfortunately for America, the grift is part of the system. American colleges aren't expensive because they've been investing in the organization, often they budget for a worse university. Each year, more money is allocated to administrators who aren't involved in teaching at the expense of instructional material/quality. Moving to a university as a center for education means ending the iron rice bowl for overeducated good thinkers. Good luck.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
Well when it’s free & the gov pays, they’ll make sure their budget is tight.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  I can't tell if you meant for this to be sarcastic or not.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    Lots of government-sponsored social programs manage on shoe-string budgets. In the US, it really comes down to how Republicans feel about a program. The programs they hate are often forced to run at maximum efficiency because they face an large amount of scrutiny and budget instability. It's the programs that Republican fail to scrutinize that become symbols of waste and mismanagement. The biggest and most obvious case is the military. I can't imagine the HHS being in a situation where they are forced by Congress to spend a few hundred million dollars on equipment they don't need, so it's given away, or having any project that costs $1,500,000,000,000. I hate to be political like this, but it's an observable trend. Scrutiny over the use of public funds by officials is an efficient means of cost-control. But the country has an issue with selective enforcement based, it seems, on how much of a program's budget is funneled into the hands of private government contractors.
    - tastygreenapple 7y ago
      This is a really interesting train of thought. Why do you think the Republicans are so effective at driving efficiency in the government? It seems like they're fantastic watch dogs of social programs, do you think the Democrats could become watch dogs of the other programs?
novok 7y ago
State universities in other countries either supply control through very high entrance standards or keeping everything cheap (think the interior of the typical USPS post office).
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  What's wrong with the post office interior? You're there to mail stuff, not to vacation.
  - Hydraulix989 7y ago
    I don’t think OP was criticizing it.
- geodel 7y ago
  I understand what you mean but USPS post office would be lot better than most of the buildings in university I attended in my country :)
- harichinnan 7y ago
  From my experience with State funded education in India. The quality of education is far from what you expect somewhere in West. Biggest problem is attracting teachers at professional education institutions like Engineering. The salaries are less than $1000 a month vs in Engineering companies which would pay a multiple of that. The schools do attract a talented bunch of students who have to clear extremely high entrance standards.
geodel 7y ago
Right. I do not see media attaching 'Populist' tag to her as they seem to do when they do not like a politician.
Shivetya 7y ago
if they want government to pay for college then government should decide what is worthy of being paid for and how much. after all that is the attitude with regards to medical care. However I feel a better solution is for the government to still do it as loans but set the rates and required classes for each degree type. simply put there are valueless degree programs out there which only enrich the schools. Colleges would still trip over themselves to offer class and degree programs to fit into these restrictions, those that don't could rely on the private market, endowments, and scholarship programs.
- vharuck 7y ago
  I don't like the idea that only career-focused degrees are important. I studied math not to get a job with those skills, but because I enjoyed math and wanted to add to the world's knowledge. Money is a means to quality of life, sure. But you can't ignore the things that are part of the "quality" because they're not profitable.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Math isn't a non-career-focused degree. It's not as immediately applicable as engineering, sure, but it does lead pretty directly to good-paying jobs. What the OP is referring to is probably degrees such as theater, women's studies, philosophy, etc. Women's studies and philosophy have no real job potential, and while theater might, there's only a very small market for actors compared to the number of starlets who dream of that job, which is why LA is so full of "actors" working as restaurant waiters.
    - mywittyname 7y ago
      Pure maths is a non-career degree. Much like physics, philosophy, and history, the intent of most programs is to produce teachers and researchers. It just turns out that math is incredibly useful in many disciplines, so knowing high-level math makes you clearly employable. Career-oriented math degrees are found in the engineering school. The difference between math and philosophy is that having a pure maths degree will provide someone with a number of job prospects. But that isn't really the intent of math programs. I venture to guess most people studying math are like the GP and doing so because they enjoy math.
calhoun137 7y ago
> This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric I assume by "this" you are refering to the OP's statement that "This is what happens when there's 0 pressure on universities to price their programs competitively." One of the idea's behind free public college is to apply market pressure to private college's, so that they have to price their programs competitively. In a risk free debt financed system, prices will rise, the same dynamic happens for both medical care and real estate. I am not sure on what basis you think this kind of system would make the problems worse. Also I am curious, are you in favor of abolishing public high school? What part of your argument against free college does not apply to free high schools? One of the many talking points behind the free college proposal is that in today's job market, a college degree has the some utility that a high school degree used to have.
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  I am not against free public education, and if I were starting a system from scratch I think making public universities free would be a great idea, for the reasons you point to. The current proposals as I understand them will subsidize tuition at the current, severely inflated rate, letting the colleges get away with their price gouging, and I want to see accountability there. I wonder if as an incremental step attaching cost effectiveness conditions to school's ability to accept loan funds would be better. I believe this was Obama's general approach, though I will admit I have not looked into the issue deeply.
  - calhoun137 7y ago
    > The current proposals as I understand them will subsidize tuition at the current, severely inflated rate, letting the colleges get away with their price gouging This is great point in my opinion. Solving this issue in the real world is not simple, it comes down more to the political power of various competing factions than it does to coming up with a "big idea". Once you have a "big idea" (like free public college), unless your faction has sufficient political power, then how are you going to implement it? The problem is not that we are lacking big ideas that will work, there are many of them. The problem is we don't have the political power to implement a single one of them. Consider this statement from the OP: "Look no further than this chart (https://i.imgur.com/B3sVMjg.png https://i.imgur.com/B3sVMjg.png), around 2010 was when the gov started fully backing and giving the loans directly, and conveniently it's when students needs for loans skyrocketed. It's so obvious that colleges took advantage of it." Right now the gov't intervene's in public education by "fully backing and giving the loans directly". My position is that not all forms of government intervention are inherently bad, for example, the way the government intervenes in public high school is something we both agree is good. I believe that the current way the gov't intervenes in college education is deeply problematic, and that instead of completely removing the role of gov't, we should copy the model from high school which has proven to work very well.
sjg007 7y ago
Most public colleges had significant funding guarantees in the State budget. A consequence of the 2008 financial crisis was that most State legislatures cut these obligations significantly. Accordingly, colleges had to raise tuition prices to compensate for the lost funding. I see student loans as basically a tax on the middle class. Get an education and a better job and pay an additional 6.5% tax on what you borrowed for 10 years. It would be better to have higher taxes on everyone but this is basically what we have now.
- magduf 7y ago
  From what I've seen, State Universities seem to be awash in cash, and use it for enormous amounts of expensive construction.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sjg007 7y ago
    Well, they raised tuition and have record enrollments due to demographic change.. The construction to take advantage of continued revenue trends (to put it in financial terms)... but maybe I missed your point?
  - jldugger 7y ago
    Not exactly. Public uni finance is complicated. They are building, but in many cases, construction is required to compete for research grants. The chemical engineering labs built in the 50s are not always sufficient for modern science, for example. And in general, State Universities should be growing to serve their state's growing populations. Where things get tricky is funding this. By and large, new construction is donor secured -- it's relatively easy to put a name on a building. But those donations come attached with strings, ie the name on the building. you can't reallocate it elsewhere. And donor funding for endowed faculty seats or administrative costs are not so frequent. Ongoing costs of running the university (salaries, utilities, maintenance, public safety, cleaning) are funded via three main sources: state funding (ever dwindling), tuition (ever growing but small overall) and research. Research is where state universities pull in the big bucks, but it also often requires expensive specialty capital equipment and facilities in which to install and run it. A rule of thumb is 30 percent of research grant is handed over to administrative overhead. That is effectively rent to pay for depreciation of the building. tl;dr: expensive construction is required to further the mission of public universities, and doesn't mean general funds are available.
peteretep 7y ago
> This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric from Elizabeth Warren and the like... ITT! American discovers something else almost all of the rich world is doing, claims it can't be done.
- AlgorithmicTime 7y ago
  No. He didn't say that at all.
tw04 7y ago
Like the giant wealth transfer to elementary and high schools...? As the child of a couple teachers, I can tell you they're both still waiting on this wealth transfer you speak of.
- wyclif 7y ago
  This is a non-sequitur. The wealth transfer isn't going to teachers, it's going to administrators, stakeholders, and shareholders. Essentially the wealth is being transferred to the corporation, not the employees.
  - tw04 7y ago
    Who are these stakeholders and shareholders in Public Universities? As for non-sequitur - the administrators are making their money off of the sports teams, not tuition.

dd36 7y ago

Or to do exactly as the OP said: this is what we’ll pay per student.

freewilly1040 7y ago
Is this what is being proposed though? I agree with this approach, but I haven't seen the proposals being framed this way.
conanbatt 7y ago
School vouchers. Still bad for college: why give free money to the richest of society?
- leetcrew 7y ago
  it's not really giving them free money when they've already paid way more than the value of a single voucher in taxes that year.
- ndiscussion 7y ago
  Because they will stay in our country and help us develop the most productive economy on earth. imo.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    Thats usually critiqued as "trickle down economics", curiously by the same group that advocates free college.
- dd36 7y ago
  Because relatively speaking, there’s not that many of them and it’s only fair. The rich get Medicare, right?
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    Medicare definitely has regressive components to it. But I don't know enough about the aggregates to make a conclusion.

jimmaswell 7y ago

Free college works just fine elsewhere.

ngngngng 7y ago
Yes, but do other places have the complication of having to replace systems that are sucking billions of dollars out of students to line the pockets of university presidents? This is what makes me skeptical. A solution in the United States for our education, healthcare, or other problems has to involve removing the leeches from the system. But political bribery is legal in the US, and the leeches have more than enough money to bribe the politicians. So insurance companies will keep existing. University presidents will keep taking home 7 figures. Turbotax won't go away anytime soon. You can either find a way to suck money away from the vulnerable, or you can be poor.
- Elv13 7y ago
  Canada did switch from "for profit" health care to universal one in the 60's. Of course the doctors were furious, but it worked, eventually. Same thing for electricity in Quebec in the 40's. Same thing from prying the education system out of the church hands in the 60's. In all the case of electricity, it is hugely profitable for the government and used to balance the budget. I went to university and turned a good profit working part time as a programmer (while paying everything and having an apartment). My University had a balanced budget too and grew over 50% since I graduated. Hospitals are as good as anywhere else. They spend billions building them and replace the older facility as they become obsolete. Yet the cost are totally under control. Public infrastructure work as long as the bureaucracy is kept in check and corruption is managed properly. Inefficiencies and corruption is unavoidable, but at least the slippery slope of "on purpose" waste like US Universities is avoided. edit: typo
  - tastygreenapple 7y ago
    Unfortunately for America, the grift is part of the system. American colleges aren't expensive because they've been investing in the organization, often they budget for a worse university. Each year, more money is allocated to administrators who aren't involved in teaching at the expense of instructional material/quality. Moving to a university as a center for education means ending the iron rice bowl for overeducated good thinkers. Good luck.

thatfrenchguy 7y ago

Well when it’s free & the gov pays, they’ll make sure their budget is tight.

partiallypro 7y ago
I can't tell if you meant for this to be sarcastic or not.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  Lots of government-sponsored social programs manage on shoe-string budgets. In the US, it really comes down to how Republicans feel about a program. The programs they hate are often forced to run at maximum efficiency because they face an large amount of scrutiny and budget instability. It's the programs that Republican fail to scrutinize that become symbols of waste and mismanagement. The biggest and most obvious case is the military. I can't imagine the HHS being in a situation where they are forced by Congress to spend a few hundred million dollars on equipment they don't need, so it's given away, or having any project that costs $1,500,000,000,000. I hate to be political like this, but it's an observable trend. Scrutiny over the use of public funds by officials is an efficient means of cost-control. But the country has an issue with selective enforcement based, it seems, on how much of a program's budget is funneled into the hands of private government contractors.
  - tastygreenapple 7y ago
    This is a really interesting train of thought. Why do you think the Republicans are so effective at driving efficiency in the government? It seems like they're fantastic watch dogs of social programs, do you think the Democrats could become watch dogs of the other programs?

novok 7y ago

State universities in other countries either supply control through very high entrance standards or keeping everything cheap (think the interior of the typical USPS post office).

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
What's wrong with the post office interior? You're there to mail stuff, not to vacation.
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  I don’t think OP was criticizing it.
geodel 7y ago
I understand what you mean but USPS post office would be lot better than most of the buildings in university I attended in my country :)
harichinnan 7y ago
From my experience with State funded education in India. The quality of education is far from what you expect somewhere in West. Biggest problem is attracting teachers at professional education institutions like Engineering. The salaries are less than $1000 a month vs in Engineering companies which would pay a multiple of that. The schools do attract a talented bunch of students who have to clear extremely high entrance standards.

geodel 7y ago

Right. I do not see media attaching 'Populist' tag to her as they seem to do when they do not like a politician.

Shivetya 7y ago

if they want government to pay for college then government should decide what is worthy of being paid for and how much. after all that is the attitude with regards to medical care. However I feel a better solution is for the government to still do it as loans but set the rates and required classes for each degree type. simply put there are valueless degree programs out there which only enrich the schools. Colleges would still trip over themselves to offer class and degree programs to fit into these restrictions, those that don't could rely on the private market, endowments, and scholarship programs.

vharuck 7y ago
I don't like the idea that only career-focused degrees are important. I studied math not to get a job with those skills, but because I enjoyed math and wanted to add to the world's knowledge. Money is a means to quality of life, sure. But you can't ignore the things that are part of the "quality" because they're not profitable.
- magduf 7y ago
  Math isn't a non-career-focused degree. It's not as immediately applicable as engineering, sure, but it does lead pretty directly to good-paying jobs. What the OP is referring to is probably degrees such as theater, women's studies, philosophy, etc. Women's studies and philosophy have no real job potential, and while theater might, there's only a very small market for actors compared to the number of starlets who dream of that job, which is why LA is so full of "actors" working as restaurant waiters.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    Pure maths is a non-career degree. Much like physics, philosophy, and history, the intent of most programs is to produce teachers and researchers. It just turns out that math is incredibly useful in many disciplines, so knowing high-level math makes you clearly employable. Career-oriented math degrees are found in the engineering school. The difference between math and philosophy is that having a pure maths degree will provide someone with a number of job prospects. But that isn't really the intent of math programs. I venture to guess most people studying math are like the GP and doing so because they enjoy math.

calhoun137 7y ago

> This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric I assume by "this" you are refering to the OP's statement that "This is what happens when there's 0 pressure on universities to price their programs competitively." One of the idea's behind free public college is to apply market pressure to private college's, so that they have to price their programs competitively. In a risk free debt financed system, prices will rise, the same dynamic happens for both medical care and real estate. I am not sure on what basis you think this kind of system would make the problems worse. Also I am curious, are you in favor of abolishing public high school? What part of your argument against free college does not apply to free high schools? One of the many talking points behind the free college proposal is that in today's job market, a college degree has the some utility that a high school degree used to have.

freewilly1040 7y ago
I am not against free public education, and if I were starting a system from scratch I think making public universities free would be a great idea, for the reasons you point to. The current proposals as I understand them will subsidize tuition at the current, severely inflated rate, letting the colleges get away with their price gouging, and I want to see accountability there. I wonder if as an incremental step attaching cost effectiveness conditions to school's ability to accept loan funds would be better. I believe this was Obama's general approach, though I will admit I have not looked into the issue deeply.
- calhoun137 7y ago
  > The current proposals as I understand them will subsidize tuition at the current, severely inflated rate, letting the colleges get away with their price gouging This is great point in my opinion. Solving this issue in the real world is not simple, it comes down more to the political power of various competing factions than it does to coming up with a "big idea". Once you have a "big idea" (like free public college), unless your faction has sufficient political power, then how are you going to implement it? The problem is not that we are lacking big ideas that will work, there are many of them. The problem is we don't have the political power to implement a single one of them. Consider this statement from the OP: "Look no further than this chart (https://i.imgur.com/B3sVMjg.png https://i.imgur.com/B3sVMjg.png), around 2010 was when the gov started fully backing and giving the loans directly, and conveniently it's when students needs for loans skyrocketed. It's so obvious that colleges took advantage of it." Right now the gov't intervene's in public education by "fully backing and giving the loans directly". My position is that not all forms of government intervention are inherently bad, for example, the way the government intervenes in public high school is something we both agree is good. I believe that the current way the gov't intervenes in college education is deeply problematic, and that instead of completely removing the role of gov't, we should copy the model from high school which has proven to work very well.

sjg007 7y ago

Most public colleges had significant funding guarantees in the State budget. A consequence of the 2008 financial crisis was that most State legislatures cut these obligations significantly. Accordingly, colleges had to raise tuition prices to compensate for the lost funding. I see student loans as basically a tax on the middle class. Get an education and a better job and pay an additional 6.5% tax on what you borrowed for 10 years. It would be better to have higher taxes on everyone but this is basically what we have now.

magduf 7y ago
From what I've seen, State Universities seem to be awash in cash, and use it for enormous amounts of expensive construction.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sjg007 7y ago
  Well, they raised tuition and have record enrollments due to demographic change.. The construction to take advantage of continued revenue trends (to put it in financial terms)... but maybe I missed your point?
- jldugger 7y ago
  Not exactly. Public uni finance is complicated. They are building, but in many cases, construction is required to compete for research grants. The chemical engineering labs built in the 50s are not always sufficient for modern science, for example. And in general, State Universities should be growing to serve their state's growing populations. Where things get tricky is funding this. By and large, new construction is donor secured -- it's relatively easy to put a name on a building. But those donations come attached with strings, ie the name on the building. you can't reallocate it elsewhere. And donor funding for endowed faculty seats or administrative costs are not so frequent. Ongoing costs of running the university (salaries, utilities, maintenance, public safety, cleaning) are funded via three main sources: state funding (ever dwindling), tuition (ever growing but small overall) and research. Research is where state universities pull in the big bucks, but it also often requires expensive specialty capital equipment and facilities in which to install and run it. A rule of thumb is 30 percent of research grant is handed over to administrative overhead. That is effectively rent to pay for depreciation of the building. tl;dr: expensive construction is required to further the mission of public universities, and doesn't mean general funds are available.

peteretep 7y ago

> This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric from Elizabeth Warren and the like... ITT! American discovers something else almost all of the rich world is doing, claims it can't be done.

AlgorithmicTime 7y ago
No. He didn't say that at all.

tw04 7y ago

Like the giant wealth transfer to elementary and high schools...? As the child of a couple teachers, I can tell you they're both still waiting on this wealth transfer you speak of.

wyclif 7y ago
This is a non-sequitur. The wealth transfer isn't going to teachers, it's going to administrators, stakeholders, and shareholders. Essentially the wealth is being transferred to the corporation, not the employees.
- tw04 7y ago
  Who are these stakeholders and shareholders in Public Universities? As for non-sequitur - the administrators are making their money off of the sports teams, not tuition.