As a Frenchman who greatly benefited from free Universities I was about to verbally tear you a new asshole, but I don't actually disagree as much as I thought w

As a Frenchman who greatly benefited from free Universities I was about to verbally tear you a new asshole, but I don't actually disagree as much as I thought with what you wrote and I appreciate the time you put in writing a nuanced take. Point 3 I think is a given, social aids should be given proportionally to the financial needs of each student. The fact that I paid almost the same as a child from a poor family as some of my friends did while being bankrolled by their parents is not normal. Point 1 I agree but with caveats. The issue is that ROI is hard to estimate. If you just use "money" as the metric then you end up with only shallow education system where only the rich can afford to study the classics and everybody else has to be a good little drone. Money doesn't quantify social good, and an educated population is a good thing to have even if not everybody is an engineer. Maybe a set of scholarships should be set aside for the students willing to sacrifice themselves to fill that need, and the rest of the available funds be divided among people who have a career plan? It might cut down on the number of kids going into biology, psychology or business administration as a place holder until they figured out their life. Point 2 is even harder because I was a barely passing high school student, but I now have a PhD in computer science and I teach in a Russell Group university in England - high school performance is a piss poor indicator of academic ambition, and should not be used as a proxy for it. My personal opinion is that conditioning funding on effort, rather than results, would be a better thing - show up to classes and do the work and the funding will keep coming even if you have a few setbacks here and there. That's already in place in our current funding system in France, but the administrative cost means that there is often a one year lag between the student completely slacking off and the CROUS cutting off their stipend.