10 ms·

This idea is not really new - the California Master Plan for Education essentially promised a free higher education to everyone in California. In 1960. [1] As

by xmddmx 3y ago

This idea is not really new - the California Master Plan for Education essentially promised a free higher education to everyone in California. In 1960. [1] As these things go, the plan was eroded over time, with the (in)famous Proposition 13 of 1978 dealing a big blow. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Higher_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...

ajju 3y ago
They implemented a great component of those ideas. Seems like cause for at least some celebration, right? :)
- xmddmx 3y ago
  I'm an educator, and a social democrat (approximately) so "yes"? What saddens me is that grand (and simple) plan "free education for all" gets watered down and chipped away to "free education for those who have money or connections" and later attempts to shore it up offten amount to "free education for $special_group". While I don't deny $special_group should get free education, what gets me is all the special-pleading going on. In OOM programming terms, it's like we had a universal principle which was easy to implement, and this has now been replaced by a bunch of switch/case statements...
  - lisper 3y ago
    I'm approximately a social democrat too, but I'm also a pragmatist. Asking for "free education" is like a child asking for a pony. Education, like everything, costs money, and we can't just wave a magic wand and change that. The only question is who pays for it: the student, or someone else. "Free education" really means education paid for by society at large rather than students. I'm not saying that's a bad idea. It isn't. In fact, it's a really good idea. But I really wish we'd stop calling it something that it's not.
    - xmddmx 3y ago
      "social democrat" - are you sure? the point remains: some services are social goods and should be treated as such, so that "nobody lacks for inability to pay". That's not literally "free" but has the same meaning in practice.
      - lisper 3y ago
        > "social democrat" - are you sure? Pretty sure, yes. Why do you doubt it? > some services are social goods and should be treated as such I'm not disputing that. I'm just taking issue with the marketing strategy. I don't like selling it as "free education" because that's a lie, and I don't like lying because it catches up with you eventually. I think it should be called what it is: government-subsidized education. (I also think it should be means-tested. I see no reason for society to pick up the tab for rich people's kids.)
        ROTMetro 3y ago
        Should we call all grocery stores 'government subsidized food stores' since American AG receives a huge amount of government subsidies? Gas stations 'government subsidized gas stations' or maybe 'government owned' since a large amount of US oilfields are on US government owned land via leases? Should anything that is government subsidized should have some pejorative prefix added to it or just free education?
        lisper 3y ago
        Are the grocery stores in your area advertised as “free”? Mine aren’t.
      - jonhohle 3y ago
        Something is not free if someone else is forced to pay for it. It’s really easy to be generous with other people’s resources.
        nxx788 3y ago
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I understand and empathize, but you also realize that college in the 60's and in the 2020's are completely different beasts no, right? The genie is out of the lamp, but we literally don't have the room to stuff it back in. CA's population has tripled in 60 years, and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good). There are more students competing for university today than there were people in 60's california. Thankfully not all of them are trying to apply specifically to UCLA or even in state, but the numbers are staggering.
    - xmddmx 3y ago
      > CA's population has tripled in 60 years and so has the tax base and # of teachers. This is a non-issue. Society scales. > and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good). Not necessarily : see my comment below.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Even if teachers have (which I'm not convinced of to begin with), Universities and land haven't. Its no secret that we've had an overpopulation crisis for the past few decades as is, so We haven't fully solved that issue as of now. And I'm equally unsure if taxes have tripled, between increasing poverty on the bottom and more and more tax evasion on top.
        rdevsrex 3y ago
        I'm sure if we built new universities, there would be plenty of applicants to teach it in, given how fierce the competition for academic positions already is. If capacity at existing colleges is the problem, we could start new ones.
        User23 3y ago
        Where exactly would you propose building them? A competitive university is going to require around 2,000 acres of land. Where are you going to find that in today's California? No doubt there is plenty of open space left, but it's not in very desirable areas.
  - ajju 3y ago
    A few loosely coupled thoughts on the subject - mostly to flesh out my own thinking (tldr - in which I conclude that we agree on the goal but disagree on “which was easy to implement”, after thinking through my own educational / economical history at some length ;)) I benefited from: * a nearly free and (luckily) high quality school education from kindergarten through 12th grade - most schools were not that great in my time, I lucked out (with parents who strived / persisted until they got me into the right one) * a nearly free but terrible education for my bachelors in engineering in India * a largely discounted and excellent post-graduate education in the US, paid for by my work as a research assistant, which I had to compete for, and that paid the equivalent of $375/month after taxes for working 20 hours a week with a full course load from which I paid my living expenses (in the early oughts - so i was poor :)), but came with a tuition waiver. Here’s how it has led me to approach this subject: * I definitely agree that the ideal of nearly free education for everyone that wants it is the right one for a richer society like America to strive for, but subject to some basic rules(eg maintain non-abysmal grades that reflect at least basic effort) * Free just means someone else is paying for it - and that has its limits. In a free / subsidized college world, major states in India had (have?) so few engineering colleges that if you got less than 99%, you couldn’t study technology - at all! Barring a stroke of luck (family moving to another state where I at least got into a pretty bad engineering college) , I would have had to study economics instead of engineering. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/delhi-university-cut-off-for-btech-is-99-per-cent/articleshow/20794757.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/delhi-uni... * Around the time of the article above (maybe a few years before) India started allowing private colleges to charge more. This has made education a lot more expensive in India on average, although I believe a similar number of “free seats” still exist, but the number of “seats” to study popular fields has gone up by on order of magnitude, and that has enabled a LOT more people to study what they want, but incomes have grown a lot too for white collar workers. For many (not all) fields, folks are able to take a loan and pay it back. * If, for instance, the US government paid for just “degree granting post-secondary institutions” expenses, it would instantly become the #2 budget category just below social security and above health, medicare, “income security” and defense. * It seems that 65% of US adults over 25 do not have a bachelors degree. It seems likely many of them will not support using their tax dollars to create a new #2 budget liability - despite the “chicken-or-egg” dynamic - that if the education was free, many of them would have a degree, and might support it.
jasmer 3y ago
[dead]
slavboj 3y ago
There is this meme that Prop 13 is responsible for everything bad in California because of course we could pay for anything if we had more money. In reality the CA budget has grown faster than inflation for decades. https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-government-revenue-and-expenditure/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-...
- shuckles 3y ago
  That comparison makes no sense. At the very least you’d want to look at per capita figures. Prop 13’s impact on the political economy, empowering comfortable boomers, is probably as bad as its impacts on the budget.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    Prop 13 drives real estate prices up and rents while they lag also follow. And that drives the price of labor up as well. Even more malign it discourages muni's from approving housing because the property taxes don't cover the services that muni's have to pay for.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      > And that drives the price of labor up as well. This is the real reason manufacturing is leaving the West, not regulation and not evil plan by China. This is also the real reason for culture of thowing away things and not repairing -> a new dishwasher costs £300, but a mechanic needs to charge £100 an hour to pay rent. If you rent is 50% of your income, the rent is actuslly 75% of your income -> because when you pay for anything, say get a plumber, 50% of your money goes to pay the plumber's rent. If, hypothetically, rents were zero, the plumber would cost twice less. You would have 4 times more money.
      - gilbertbw 3y ago
        But not 100% of your income goes to paying for labour in your local economy. You buy goods and services that are from elsewhere (food from France, entertainment from America) etc.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bandrami 3y ago
It was a lot easier to make college free when 20% of your high school graduates went on to college. Now that it's over 50% that's harder. OTOH, that in itself shows that the increased tuition hasn't actually kept people from going to college.
sosodev 3y ago
To be fair a lot of California students get a free education. I moved to California as a poor teenager. I became a resident and then had all of my costs (minus housing) covered during both community and state college. I never thought something like that would be possible for me. It ended up being fairly easy. Moving to California radically changed my life for the better.

by xmddmx 3y ago

ajju 3y ago

They implemented a great component of those ideas. Seems like cause for at least some celebration, right? :)

xmddmx 3y ago
I'm an educator, and a social democrat (approximately) so "yes"? What saddens me is that grand (and simple) plan "free education for all" gets watered down and chipped away to "free education for those who have money or connections" and later attempts to shore it up offten amount to "free education for $special_group". While I don't deny $special_group should get free education, what gets me is all the special-pleading going on. In OOM programming terms, it's like we had a universal principle which was easy to implement, and this has now been replaced by a bunch of switch/case statements...
- lisper 3y ago
  I'm approximately a social democrat too, but I'm also a pragmatist. Asking for "free education" is like a child asking for a pony. Education, like everything, costs money, and we can't just wave a magic wand and change that. The only question is who pays for it: the student, or someone else. "Free education" really means education paid for by society at large rather than students. I'm not saying that's a bad idea. It isn't. In fact, it's a really good idea. But I really wish we'd stop calling it something that it's not.
  - xmddmx 3y ago
    "social democrat" - are you sure? the point remains: some services are social goods and should be treated as such, so that "nobody lacks for inability to pay". That's not literally "free" but has the same meaning in practice.
    - lisper 3y ago
      > "social democrat" - are you sure? Pretty sure, yes. Why do you doubt it? > some services are social goods and should be treated as such I'm not disputing that. I'm just taking issue with the marketing strategy. I don't like selling it as "free education" because that's a lie, and I don't like lying because it catches up with you eventually. I think it should be called what it is: government-subsidized education. (I also think it should be means-tested. I see no reason for society to pick up the tab for rich people's kids.)
      - ROTMetro 3y ago
        Should we call all grocery stores 'government subsidized food stores' since American AG receives a huge amount of government subsidies? Gas stations 'government subsidized gas stations' or maybe 'government owned' since a large amount of US oilfields are on US government owned land via leases? Should anything that is government subsidized should have some pejorative prefix added to it or just free education?
        lisper 3y ago
        Are the grocery stores in your area advertised as “free”? Mine aren’t.
    - jonhohle 3y ago
      Something is not free if someone else is forced to pay for it. It’s really easy to be generous with other people’s resources.
      - nxx788 3y ago
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I understand and empathize, but you also realize that college in the 60's and in the 2020's are completely different beasts no, right? The genie is out of the lamp, but we literally don't have the room to stuff it back in. CA's population has tripled in 60 years, and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good). There are more students competing for university today than there were people in 60's california. Thankfully not all of them are trying to apply specifically to UCLA or even in state, but the numbers are staggering.
  - xmddmx 3y ago
    > CA's population has tripled in 60 years and so has the tax base and # of teachers. This is a non-issue. Society scales. > and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good). Not necessarily : see my comment below.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Even if teachers have (which I'm not convinced of to begin with), Universities and land haven't. Its no secret that we've had an overpopulation crisis for the past few decades as is, so We haven't fully solved that issue as of now. And I'm equally unsure if taxes have tripled, between increasing poverty on the bottom and more and more tax evasion on top.
      - rdevsrex 3y ago
        I'm sure if we built new universities, there would be plenty of applicants to teach it in, given how fierce the competition for academic positions already is. If capacity at existing colleges is the problem, we could start new ones.
        User23 3y ago
        Where exactly would you propose building them? A competitive university is going to require around 2,000 acres of land. Where are you going to find that in today's California? No doubt there is plenty of open space left, but it's not in very desirable areas.
- ajju 3y ago
  A few loosely coupled thoughts on the subject - mostly to flesh out my own thinking (tldr - in which I conclude that we agree on the goal but disagree on “which was easy to implement”, after thinking through my own educational / economical history at some length ;)) I benefited from: * a nearly free and (luckily) high quality school education from kindergarten through 12th grade - most schools were not that great in my time, I lucked out (with parents who strived / persisted until they got me into the right one) * a nearly free but terrible education for my bachelors in engineering in India * a largely discounted and excellent post-graduate education in the US, paid for by my work as a research assistant, which I had to compete for, and that paid the equivalent of $375/month after taxes for working 20 hours a week with a full course load from which I paid my living expenses (in the early oughts - so i was poor :)), but came with a tuition waiver. Here’s how it has led me to approach this subject: * I definitely agree that the ideal of nearly free education for everyone that wants it is the right one for a richer society like America to strive for, but subject to some basic rules(eg maintain non-abysmal grades that reflect at least basic effort) * Free just means someone else is paying for it - and that has its limits. In a free / subsidized college world, major states in India had (have?) so few engineering colleges that if you got less than 99%, you couldn’t study technology - at all! Barring a stroke of luck (family moving to another state where I at least got into a pretty bad engineering college) , I would have had to study economics instead of engineering. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/delhi-university-cut-off-for-btech-is-99-per-cent/articleshow/20794757.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/delhi-uni... * Around the time of the article above (maybe a few years before) India started allowing private colleges to charge more. This has made education a lot more expensive in India on average, although I believe a similar number of “free seats” still exist, but the number of “seats” to study popular fields has gone up by on order of magnitude, and that has enabled a LOT more people to study what they want, but incomes have grown a lot too for white collar workers. For many (not all) fields, folks are able to take a loan and pay it back. * If, for instance, the US government paid for just “degree granting post-secondary institutions” expenses, it would instantly become the #2 budget category just below social security and above health, medicare, “income security” and defense. * It seems that 65% of US adults over 25 do not have a bachelors degree. It seems likely many of them will not support using their tax dollars to create a new #2 budget liability - despite the “chicken-or-egg” dynamic - that if the education was free, many of them would have a degree, and might support it.

jasmer 3y ago

[dead]

slavboj 3y ago

There is this meme that Prop 13 is responsible for everything bad in California because of course we could pay for anything if we had more money. In reality the CA budget has grown faster than inflation for decades. https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-government-revenue-and-expenditure/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-...

shuckles 3y ago
That comparison makes no sense. At the very least you’d want to look at per capita figures. Prop 13’s impact on the political economy, empowering comfortable boomers, is probably as bad as its impacts on the budget.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  Prop 13 drives real estate prices up and rents while they lag also follow. And that drives the price of labor up as well. Even more malign it discourages muni's from approving housing because the property taxes don't cover the services that muni's have to pay for.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > And that drives the price of labor up as well. This is the real reason manufacturing is leaving the West, not regulation and not evil plan by China. This is also the real reason for culture of thowing away things and not repairing -> a new dishwasher costs £300, but a mechanic needs to charge £100 an hour to pay rent. If you rent is 50% of your income, the rent is actuslly 75% of your income -> because when you pay for anything, say get a plumber, 50% of your money goes to pay the plumber's rent. If, hypothetically, rents were zero, the plumber would cost twice less. You would have 4 times more money.
    - gilbertbw 3y ago
      But not 100% of your income goes to paying for labour in your local economy. You buy goods and services that are from elsewhere (food from France, entertainment from America) etc.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bandrami 3y ago

It was a lot easier to make college free when 20% of your high school graduates went on to college. Now that it's over 50% that's harder. OTOH, that in itself shows that the increased tuition hasn't actually kept people from going to college.

sosodev 3y ago

To be fair a lot of California students get a free education. I moved to California as a poor teenager. I became a resident and then had all of my costs (minus housing) covered during both community and state college. I never thought something like that would be possible for me. It ended up being fairly easy. Moving to California radically changed my life for the better.