5 ms·

Free Public Education anyone? It amazes me how countries like USA and Chile indebt their youth basically for life, specially nowadays that having a degree doesn

Free Public Education anyone? It amazes me how countries like USA and Chile indebt their youth basically for life, specially nowadays that having a degree doesn't even guarantee a decent job anymore.

daenz 7y ago
Can we stop calling it "free"? It is never free unless everyone is doing the work for $0. If people are still being paid, then someone is paying. I'm fine with the idea of socially investing in future generations, but it's an investment, not "free stuff."
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  Borrowing from the labeling for health care, Universal Public Education might make sense. Of course, then you'd have to contend with all the people rabidly against Universal Health Care, by association.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  > Can we stop calling it "free"? It is never free unless everyone is doing the work for $0 Can we stop pretending this point is insightful? Nobody thinks a free lunch is truly free.
  - daenz 7y ago
    >Nobody thinks a free lunch is truly free. And because of that, we don't call things "free lunches" (except maybe satirically), which is my point.
    - heavyset_go 7y ago
      And yet my local firehouse has "free breakfasts" every other weekend, and I can find "buy one get one free" deals everywhere.
      - daenz 7y ago
        Exception that proves the rule. "No such thing as a free lunch" is an idiom for a reason.
        heavyset_go 7y ago
        Because a certain type of person seems to think that it's insightful even when it isn't, hence my OP.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  It's called free because it's "given without charge". Nothing would be free under "had no costs involved in production" (not even a smile!). It's free in the same way a Christmas gift is free; but with giving education we're also guaranteed a return in an improved society with people capable of performing roles we have need of. Better to give education than to structure society around greed and demanding a profit in return for education?
  - martinald 7y ago
    I don't think it's a guarantee. In the UK (where tuition is capped at £9k($12k)/year), a whole heap of majors were shown to reduce lifetime earnings vs not going to university. The difficulty is that you are going to earn a lot less while you are at university, so if you spend 3 years there earning $0, it really drags down lifetime earnings unless the degree adds a somewhat decent %age above baseline in terms of earning power.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      > The difficulty is that you are going to earn a lot less while you are at university, so if you spend 3 years there earning $0, it really drags down lifetime earnings unless the degree adds a somewhat decent %age above baseline in terms of earning power. You'd have to have a less than 7% earning power increase, and I wouldn't even call that a decent percentage for one year of dedicated self-funded training.
  - daenz 7y ago
    >It's called free because it's "given without charge" It's not given without charge, because the taxpayer was charged. If my friend buys my lunch because I left my wallet at home, or it was more expensive than I thought, I don't say "oh wow, free lunch!" I acknowledge that the lunch was paid for by someone else. I certainly wouldn't go around telling people I got free lunch that day. That's a surefire way to make sure nobody helps me out again.
rayiner 7y ago
First, "indebt their youth basically for life" is just false. Just 1/3 of people 18-29 in the US have student debt at all: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/13/facts-about-student-loans https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/13/facts-about.... 40% of college seniors take out no loans at all. Out of people who do have debt, the median student debt for someone with a bachelors degree is $25,000. That's less than the average U.S. new car loan. Over a career, a typical college graduate will pay much more in extra taxes in one of those countries with "free public education" than the $25,000 median student debt for college. Second, the United States has "free public education." The question is do we need to extend that to tertiary education. We sent a man to the moon back when just 5% of adults had a college degree. It's not clear that sending vastly more people to college is actually going to add value.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  >>We sent a man to the moon back when just 5% of adults had a college degree. It's not clear that sending vastly more people to college is actually going to add value. This is just such incredibly shoddy reasoning, and such a stunningly bad faith argument. Come on rayiner, you can do better than this. What does sending a man to the moon have anything whatsoever to do with whether college education should be free?
  - Thorrez 7y ago
    > What does sending a man to the moon have anything whatsoever to do with whether college education should be free? raynier is saying it's not clear that more people going to college is better. raynier is certainly not the first person to say that. How it relates to the Moon is that sending a man to the Moon is evidence of scientific progress, and it shows that scientific progress was happening even when many fewer people went to college.
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      Every single person involved with sending people to the moon in the 60's graduated college, but it doesn't matter that the graduation rate was 5% back then, because you don't need more than 5% of the entire population to send people to the moon. It's a weird non sequitur argument. The reason there are more college graduates today in the US is that the US labour market requires more college graduates than it did in the 60's. Partly because the available jobs today have higher requirements, and partly because of credential inflation. Now, having your domestic labour market require more and more educated workers is a good thing, because it means that your country is moving up the value chain. You're getting rid of low qualified, easily automatable, easily outsourcable jobs, and replacing them with higher-value jobs that (presumably) produce more value per worker. Therefore, it is in your nation's interest to keep this process going, to make sure there's an ever-increasing stream of highly educated people entering the labour force. And if it's in your nation's interest, it might be worth spending tax money on it, and not leave the process up to for-profit companies whose incentives do not align with the national interest.
syshum 7y ago
>Free Public Education anyone? We have that, it is called K-12 Education. Which should be more than enough schooling for people to be successful in the workforce. We has a society devote about $300,000 to $500,000 per child to educate them through high school, if this education is so poor that we then have to devote another $200-$300K to send them on to 4 years of additional schooling before they can function in society. Well something is seriously wrong with K-12 Education and we need to reform that, not further burden the tax payer with free university for all
egdod 7y ago
Yes, more free shit for everyone is the solution to all of our woes.

Free Public Education anyone? It amazes me how countries like USA and Chile indebt their youth basically for life, specially nowadays that having a degree doesn't even guarantee a decent job anymore.

daenz 7y ago

Can we stop calling it "free"? It is never free unless everyone is doing the work for $0. If people are still being paid, then someone is paying. I'm fine with the idea of socially investing in future generations, but it's an investment, not "free stuff."

RHSeeger 7y ago
Borrowing from the labeling for health care, Universal Public Education might make sense. Of course, then you'd have to contend with all the people rabidly against Universal Health Care, by association.
heavyset_go 7y ago
> Can we stop calling it "free"? It is never free unless everyone is doing the work for $0 Can we stop pretending this point is insightful? Nobody thinks a free lunch is truly free.
- daenz 7y ago
  >Nobody thinks a free lunch is truly free. And because of that, we don't call things "free lunches" (except maybe satirically), which is my point.
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    And yet my local firehouse has "free breakfasts" every other weekend, and I can find "buy one get one free" deals everywhere.
    - daenz 7y ago
      Exception that proves the rule. "No such thing as a free lunch" is an idiom for a reason.
      - heavyset_go 7y ago
        Because a certain type of person seems to think that it's insightful even when it isn't, hence my OP.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
It's called free because it's "given without charge". Nothing would be free under "had no costs involved in production" (not even a smile!). It's free in the same way a Christmas gift is free; but with giving education we're also guaranteed a return in an improved society with people capable of performing roles we have need of. Better to give education than to structure society around greed and demanding a profit in return for education?
- martinald 7y ago
  I don't think it's a guarantee. In the UK (where tuition is capped at £9k($12k)/year), a whole heap of majors were shown to reduce lifetime earnings vs not going to university. The difficulty is that you are going to earn a lot less while you are at university, so if you spend 3 years there earning $0, it really drags down lifetime earnings unless the degree adds a somewhat decent %age above baseline in terms of earning power.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > The difficulty is that you are going to earn a lot less while you are at university, so if you spend 3 years there earning $0, it really drags down lifetime earnings unless the degree adds a somewhat decent %age above baseline in terms of earning power. You'd have to have a less than 7% earning power increase, and I wouldn't even call that a decent percentage for one year of dedicated self-funded training.
- daenz 7y ago
  >It's called free because it's "given without charge" It's not given without charge, because the taxpayer was charged. If my friend buys my lunch because I left my wallet at home, or it was more expensive than I thought, I don't say "oh wow, free lunch!" I acknowledge that the lunch was paid for by someone else. I certainly wouldn't go around telling people I got free lunch that day. That's a surefire way to make sure nobody helps me out again.

rayiner 7y ago

First, "indebt their youth basically for life" is just false. Just 1/3 of people 18-29 in the US have student debt at all: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/13/facts-about-student-loans https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/13/facts-about.... 40% of college seniors take out no loans at all. Out of people who do have debt, the median student debt for someone with a bachelors degree is $25,000. That's less than the average U.S. new car loan. Over a career, a typical college graduate will pay much more in extra taxes in one of those countries with "free public education" than the $25,000 median student debt for college. Second, the United States has "free public education." The question is do we need to extend that to tertiary education. We sent a man to the moon back when just 5% of adults had a college degree. It's not clear that sending vastly more people to college is actually going to add value.

enraged_camel 7y ago
>>We sent a man to the moon back when just 5% of adults had a college degree. It's not clear that sending vastly more people to college is actually going to add value. This is just such incredibly shoddy reasoning, and such a stunningly bad faith argument. Come on rayiner, you can do better than this. What does sending a man to the moon have anything whatsoever to do with whether college education should be free?
- Thorrez 7y ago
  > What does sending a man to the moon have anything whatsoever to do with whether college education should be free? raynier is saying it's not clear that more people going to college is better. raynier is certainly not the first person to say that. How it relates to the Moon is that sending a man to the Moon is evidence of scientific progress, and it shows that scientific progress was happening even when many fewer people went to college.
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    Every single person involved with sending people to the moon in the 60's graduated college, but it doesn't matter that the graduation rate was 5% back then, because you don't need more than 5% of the entire population to send people to the moon. It's a weird non sequitur argument. The reason there are more college graduates today in the US is that the US labour market requires more college graduates than it did in the 60's. Partly because the available jobs today have higher requirements, and partly because of credential inflation. Now, having your domestic labour market require more and more educated workers is a good thing, because it means that your country is moving up the value chain. You're getting rid of low qualified, easily automatable, easily outsourcable jobs, and replacing them with higher-value jobs that (presumably) produce more value per worker. Therefore, it is in your nation's interest to keep this process going, to make sure there's an ever-increasing stream of highly educated people entering the labour force. And if it's in your nation's interest, it might be worth spending tax money on it, and not leave the process up to for-profit companies whose incentives do not align with the national interest.

syshum 7y ago

>Free Public Education anyone? We have that, it is called K-12 Education. Which should be more than enough schooling for people to be successful in the workforce. We has a society devote about $300,000 to $500,000 per child to educate them through high school, if this education is so poor that we then have to devote another $200-$300K to send them on to 4 years of additional schooling before they can function in society. Well something is seriously wrong with K-12 Education and we need to reform that, not further burden the tax payer with free university for all

egdod 7y ago

Yes, more free shit for everyone is the solution to all of our woes.