> I don't get why people have to add so many qualifiers to the word free It's because it's not free. It costs taxpayers money and more importantly, it costs yo

> I don't get why people have to add so many qualifiers to the word free It's because it's not free. It costs taxpayers money and more importantly, it costs young people prime years of their lives. College is a great choice for some people, but there are many others who it doesn't serve well. There's a tremendous cost in everyone having a default assumption that they need to delay whatever else they'd do with their lives to get a credential they don't really want, can't really use but feel immense social pressure to pursue. It's not as bad as the situation in Europe or Japan, but far too many Americans go to college. Increasingly, China appears headed down the same path. Mass post-secondary schooling is also sub-optimal from a supply and demand perspective. Every year the market is flooded with millions of youths who graduated with the same small number of common degrees. As a result, the economic reward for those skills falls. > Only one industrial country doesn't provide basically free secondary education, and it's not like the US has anything to show for that choice. Secondary education is "free" (not really, but subsidized) in the US, to a further degree than most industrialized countries. Doing this for the secondary level is much more reasonable than for college, but there are still some serious issues around how the system is essentially designed for Prussian factory workers from a previous century. For the first half of my career, I was a school teacher (not in the US) and this topic is near and dear to my heart. Improvement on this axis is possibly one of the lowest hanging fruits that can lead to increased flourishing of human prosperity and happiness. > Removing the profit motive from education seems wildly uncontroversial everywhere but the US and for what? Profit as a motive in education is huge in China, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan and most countries I've lived in. I'm not sure where you live, but it's definitely not representative of the world as a whole.