6 ms·

There is no free. Free means Janet's dad who didn't go to college get to pay additional so Bill's son goes for free. When resources are free, they become eithe

There is no free. Free means Janet's dad who didn't go to college get to pay additional so Bill's son goes for free. When resources are free, they become either worthless or completely over-utilized. If you make college free, that means colleges will still charge for classes, still charge for books, still charge for dorm rooms, etc. They'll send their bills to the government, to pay with increased tax dollars. They'll increase their rates to the gov't also. Professors and administrators aren't working for free. Groundskeepers either. TA's won't either because now they don't have tuition. Professors workloads just increased because normally they have TA's to teach and grade for them. So more professors are hired. Notice anything interesting? College costs which keep increasing as long as easy student loans are available, (and are responsible for the higher costs) just went up more. Now taxes are increasing and additional gov't administration for programs are implemented. Looks like a major redistribution of wealth, from taxpayers to educational institutions. :-/ This is my surprised face.

snowwrestler 7y ago
You should realize that primary and secondary school are already provided "free" to anyone, and the reasons that works are just as valid for college. There's nothing magically impossible about using taxpayer money to provide 16 years of education instead of 12.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  It benefits us as a country to have an electorate who can read and write and have a basic understanding of civics and history. It doesn't necessarily appear to benefit us the same way to have a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees to make mom and dad happy. There are a lot of benefits to college, but a lot of those benefits go away when college stops becoming a choice and starts becoming mandated state education.
  - snowwrestler 7y ago
    How about if a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees because sophisticated communication is a critical skill when your entire economy is based on information? It's really striking to me how the arguments against college for all today mirror the arguments against secondary school for all 120 years ago. Hopefully the parallel continues and our great grandkids can take their advanced education for granted the way we take secondary school for granted today.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      We don't live in a world where "sophisticated communication" alone gets you hired unfortunately. Primary/secondary education is meant to build reasonably well rounded individuals who meet the basic skills to function well in society. Paying significant amounts of money to do that for an additional four years with no return on investment, whether it's the individual or the taxpayers at large, is silly.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      > How about if a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees because sophisticated communication is a critical skill when your entire economy is based on information? This is an argument for teaching Communications or Rhetoric. It fails completely as an argument for English, which is mostly an exercise in poorly imitating literary analysis in some style from the 50’s or later. Even if we did want better communicators a year of focused effort on communications/rhetoric would be enough rather than spending four. > Hopefully the parallel continues and our great grandkids can take their advanced education for granted the way we take secondary school for granted today. If tertiary education is expanded massively it will only be by the same mechanism as secondary education was, dramatic lowering of standards.
  - bonoboTP 7y ago
    You don't have to speculate, this is reality in Europe. An important part of these systems are the limits on the number of students admitted to most programs. For example in Hungary there are centralized final exams at the end of secondary school (age 18-19) and you get a score at the end. You can apply to several universities at the same time, in a preferential order. Then, each year, an algorithm goes down the list of all students ordered by their score and allocates them to their topmost choice where there's still room. (Also there's no "soft" and subjective bullshit, like essays about your motivation and proofs of "well-roundedness".) This way the state can focus the subsidy to educational fields that will benefit the economy more, while still subsidizing a certain number of places everywhere. (Of course if you don't have enough points, there are further, paid places as well.)
  - aspaceman 7y ago
    Why the criticism of an English degree? It's an important, critical and incredibly useful subject. Especially in our increasingly connected and writing-centric world. You get an advanced workforce by making it advanced in all aspects, not just the ones that you arbitrarily value.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      There's nothing wrong with an English degree if you intend to use it and have a career path with it in mind. Unfortunately I have no shortage of friends who went with college because they were expected to, got an English degree because it was easy, and now work dead end jobs they dislike. While I'm picking on English degrees because it's easy pickings, it's not unique. Take any degree, throw enough people at it and you'll end up with a lot of degree holders not having career paths open to them.
- slowhand09 7y ago
  "the reasons that works" is debatable. Now kids in the us frequently start in pre-pre-Kindergarten. And yet we can't teach cursive writing/reading because its too hard. Baltimore City spends more per capita than any other region in the state of MD, yet nobody reads at grade level. There are many factors in play. Throwing money at free college because the 1st 12 nee 14 were free doesn't mean it works. Wanna go to college? Take a test, show you've not frittered away your 1st 12yrs. My employer paid for my MS degree courses and books. If I didn't present a =>3.0 GPA, they didn't reimburse. That provided motivation. But... there was a study in recent years showing some for-profit private colleges that relied heavily on gov't paid students had "watered down" their requirements to achieve the grades necessary to continue on a tax-payer funded basis. So there's that to deal with. Evidently Higher Ed is willing to compromise it scruples when money is involved.
- jimbob45 7y ago
  That's different though. High school educations are entirely uniform across the board.
rayiner 7y ago
> Looks like a major redistribution of wealth, from taxpayers to educational institutions. :-/ This is my surprised face. This is my beef with free college. It's a huge amount of public money going to benefit people who don't need it, all for an extremely tenuous promise of upward mobility. Kids growing up in real urban poverty aren't going to college, tuition-free or not. The hurdles keeping them from upward mobility are happening at a much earlier point than the tuition payment deadline. And the lower middle class kids who might go if college were tuition free--are they really being helped? AOC graduated with a BA cum laude from Boston University and went back to bar-tending afterward. Absolutely no criticism of that--it's honest work. But what does that story--which is common--say about the value of a BA from a college outside the top tier? I studied for the LSAT in Atlanta. I was working as an engineer at the time--all my Georgia Tech classmates had gotten good jobs in Atlanta within six months of graduation. But the folks in my LSAT class, who mostly graduated from places like Georgia State with a BA, were doing things like bar-tending, or administrative roles they could easily have done without a college degree. One of my friends works at a brewery--he says that all but one of the guys bottling/packing the beer have college degrees. Is college really adding value for these people? Or would making it free just transfer wealth from taxpayers to college professors and administrators, while graduates end up doing the same jobs they'd be qualified to do without a degree?
- bhupy 7y ago
  There's some mainstream literature (with data) that corroborates this point of view: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-10-30/free-college-would-help-the-rich-more-than-the-poor https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-10-30/free-c...
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  This might come as a shock, but AOC is a member of Congress now. (It's silly to judge the value of a college education by the jobs that people get the first few years after college.)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

snowwrestler 7y ago

You should realize that primary and secondary school are already provided "free" to anyone, and the reasons that works are just as valid for college. There's nothing magically impossible about using taxpayer money to provide 16 years of education instead of 12.

vorpalhex 7y ago
It benefits us as a country to have an electorate who can read and write and have a basic understanding of civics and history. It doesn't necessarily appear to benefit us the same way to have a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees to make mom and dad happy. There are a lot of benefits to college, but a lot of those benefits go away when college stops becoming a choice and starts becoming mandated state education.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  How about if a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees because sophisticated communication is a critical skill when your entire economy is based on information? It's really striking to me how the arguments against college for all today mirror the arguments against secondary school for all 120 years ago. Hopefully the parallel continues and our great grandkids can take their advanced education for granted the way we take secondary school for granted today.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    We don't live in a world where "sophisticated communication" alone gets you hired unfortunately. Primary/secondary education is meant to build reasonably well rounded individuals who meet the basic skills to function well in society. Paying significant amounts of money to do that for an additional four years with no return on investment, whether it's the individual or the taxpayers at large, is silly.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    > How about if a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees because sophisticated communication is a critical skill when your entire economy is based on information? This is an argument for teaching Communications or Rhetoric. It fails completely as an argument for English, which is mostly an exercise in poorly imitating literary analysis in some style from the 50’s or later. Even if we did want better communicators a year of focused effort on communications/rhetoric would be enough rather than spending four. > Hopefully the parallel continues and our great grandkids can take their advanced education for granted the way we take secondary school for granted today. If tertiary education is expanded massively it will only be by the same mechanism as secondary education was, dramatic lowering of standards.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  You don't have to speculate, this is reality in Europe. An important part of these systems are the limits on the number of students admitted to most programs. For example in Hungary there are centralized final exams at the end of secondary school (age 18-19) and you get a score at the end. You can apply to several universities at the same time, in a preferential order. Then, each year, an algorithm goes down the list of all students ordered by their score and allocates them to their topmost choice where there's still room. (Also there's no "soft" and subjective bullshit, like essays about your motivation and proofs of "well-roundedness".) This way the state can focus the subsidy to educational fields that will benefit the economy more, while still subsidizing a certain number of places everywhere. (Of course if you don't have enough points, there are further, paid places as well.)
- aspaceman 7y ago
  Why the criticism of an English degree? It's an important, critical and incredibly useful subject. Especially in our increasingly connected and writing-centric world. You get an advanced workforce by making it advanced in all aspects, not just the ones that you arbitrarily value.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    There's nothing wrong with an English degree if you intend to use it and have a career path with it in mind. Unfortunately I have no shortage of friends who went with college because they were expected to, got an English degree because it was easy, and now work dead end jobs they dislike. While I'm picking on English degrees because it's easy pickings, it's not unique. Take any degree, throw enough people at it and you'll end up with a lot of degree holders not having career paths open to them.
slowhand09 7y ago
"the reasons that works" is debatable. Now kids in the us frequently start in pre-pre-Kindergarten. And yet we can't teach cursive writing/reading because its too hard. Baltimore City spends more per capita than any other region in the state of MD, yet nobody reads at grade level. There are many factors in play. Throwing money at free college because the 1st 12 nee 14 were free doesn't mean it works. Wanna go to college? Take a test, show you've not frittered away your 1st 12yrs. My employer paid for my MS degree courses and books. If I didn't present a =>3.0 GPA, they didn't reimburse. That provided motivation. But... there was a study in recent years showing some for-profit private colleges that relied heavily on gov't paid students had "watered down" their requirements to achieve the grades necessary to continue on a tax-payer funded basis. So there's that to deal with. Evidently Higher Ed is willing to compromise it scruples when money is involved.
jimbob45 7y ago
That's different though. High school educations are entirely uniform across the board.

rayiner 7y ago

> Looks like a major redistribution of wealth, from taxpayers to educational institutions. :-/ This is my surprised face. This is my beef with free college. It's a huge amount of public money going to benefit people who don't need it, all for an extremely tenuous promise of upward mobility. Kids growing up in real urban poverty aren't going to college, tuition-free or not. The hurdles keeping them from upward mobility are happening at a much earlier point than the tuition payment deadline. And the lower middle class kids who might go if college were tuition free--are they really being helped? AOC graduated with a BA cum laude from Boston University and went back to bar-tending afterward. Absolutely no criticism of that--it's honest work. But what does that story--which is common--say about the value of a BA from a college outside the top tier? I studied for the LSAT in Atlanta. I was working as an engineer at the time--all my Georgia Tech classmates had gotten good jobs in Atlanta within six months of graduation. But the folks in my LSAT class, who mostly graduated from places like Georgia State with a BA, were doing things like bar-tending, or administrative roles they could easily have done without a college degree. One of my friends works at a brewery--he says that all but one of the guys bottling/packing the beer have college degrees. Is college really adding value for these people? Or would making it free just transfer wealth from taxpayers to college professors and administrators, while graduates end up doing the same jobs they'd be qualified to do without a degree?

bhupy 7y ago
There's some mainstream literature (with data) that corroborates this point of view: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-10-30/free-college-would-help-the-rich-more-than-the-poor https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-10-30/free-c...
snowwrestler 7y ago
This might come as a shock, but AOC is a member of Congress now. (It's silly to judge the value of a college education by the jobs that people get the first few years after college.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]