6 ms·

How should higher education be financed?

• andyjohnson0 3y ago
  General taxation. The generation currently working pays for the education of the next generation. Society prospers, economically and socially, as a result
  • Rucadi 3y ago
    This means people that don't go to the university and usually as a result has less income pays for people that goes, seems quite regressive
    • LeafItAlone 3y ago
      It is a model that is pre-existing though. My parents paid property taxes that funded local schools that I didn’t go to. I pay property tax for my local schools, but I don’t have children.
    • 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
      tax rates should be based on income and you're paying for a service that's free to all. it's a principle. whether or not you use it doesn't matter, that would be selfish.
    • einpoklum 3y ago
      1. There are more taxes other than income tax. Corporate income tax for one. Estate taxes, financial speculation tax, VAT - each world state and its own system. 2. Even regarding income tax - in most world states, tax is not flat, and most workers pay little income tax anyway (sometimes even 0, if there's a threshold for non-zero tax rate, or tax credits for various social situations etc.) So not regressive. Also, like other commenters mention - if you don't attend university, your children, or other relatives and friends, might be. Plus, we all need the higher education system to function, for modern society to function, so it makes sense that we contribute to it through some mechanism.
    • moooo99 3y ago
      Tax rates are based on income. The less you earn, the less taxes you pay. So in that sense, you could argue you don't pay for the higher education you never received. But beyond that, there is a deeply flawed logic behind indicating the tax would be "regressive" just because you personally don't benefit from it. So long the taxes are reasonably efficiently allocated (by macroeconomic standards, not by business standards) and increase a societies overall well-being, the vast majority of people benefit from it, either directly or by proxy. There are debates to be had which kind of "services" benefit from this scheme of financing the most, but being from a country where higher education is publicly funded and having benefited from this accessibility of higher-ed as well, I can see the merits of this scheme in the context of higher-education.
    • zmgsabst 3y ago
      You personally benefit when that generation pays your retirement: You’re investing in society, with an expected payout in the future (via retirement benefits). What’s crazy to me is we have a whole generation who failed to pay for maintaining the machine — but who expect to be paid out anyway.
    • bregma 3y ago
      Sure, they have to pay for those who get an education. In return, they get doctors to help them when they are sick or injured, lawyers to aid them when they are wronged or do wrong, engineers to make sure buildings do not fall on them, and myriad other benefits. Seems like a worthwhile investment.
• tamarlikesdata 3y ago
  I think the question should be, are these schools even relevant anymore? AI and violence going on on campuses make you wonder.
  • cpursley 3y ago
    Since you like data, take a look at the stats: while horrifying and I wish it were 0%, campus violence is probably pretty insignificant and maybe even lower than what occurs in the general population.
• boeingUH60 3y ago
  It should be financed by taxes, which includes caveats like eliminating virtually useless degrees like music education, drama, fashion design, anthropology, etc. People who want that can pay out of pocket for private institutions.
  • jampekka 3y ago
    How are those virtually useless degrees?
  • chrystalkey 3y ago
    That may just go to show how much you might be caught up in your bubble. All of that is a still very much active part of the human experience. Although technology has brought us great comforts and raised our living standards, art, music, anthropology, social sciences in general do absolutely have value to a great many people and contributed to a raised living standard in other ways. Even if we decide the only relevant criterium is the free market, people pay for the ability to do these things, and for good reason, just as they pay for the ability to use and develop technologies. I think it would be a great loss to all of humanity if we suddenly stopped paying for social science education. In a nutshell, and a bit polemic: What do you want humanity to be, a great many cogs in a science machine churning away without looking sideways? I would not want that.
    • cpursley 3y ago
      Do we actually need social “science” and other soft degrees, though? Aren’t these non-rigorous paths the sort of thing people can learn on their own (for free)? How are other nations tackling these sorts of advanced hobbies?
      • moooo99 3y ago
        They're sort of self-selecting over an extended period of time. While your degree may sound interesting it won't attract too much talent when there are not relevant job openings and every graduate ends up pivoting. Of course, demand does not zero out which is probably a good thing. The only degrees where this selection mechanism seems to have inverse effects are business management related ones.
• coretx 3y ago
  Not by money meant for science.
  • coretx 3y ago
    The political moderation here is sick. HN is dead.
• anothernewdude 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • lemper 3y ago
    defo agree, mate. when i was in uni, per semester uni asked for 2 months of minimum wages. this was by top 10 national uni.
  • impossiblefork 3y ago
    Here in Sweden university education costs less per head than high school education. Then of course, there's money for research, but we pay for that separately. In Russia there's the Independent University of Moscow, which probably doesn't have any expenses other than the salaries of the professors. What a university needs is skilled scientists and well-prepared students willing to work hard, and that isn't expensive.
    • HPsquared 3y ago
      As it should, I guess: university students require less supervision.
      • impossiblefork 3y ago
        Yes, if they're properly prepared. But if they aren't properly prepared they'll require individual tutoring. There are probably some university students that can't even do their calculations mentally and sit there writing furiously when doing problems on exams. Obviously that should have been dealt with when they were 13 or something, but it rarely has.
        • qayxc 3y ago
          Interesting. Back when I was in uni, the university offered a 6 week prep course that would recap/teach the basics that were expected in the first semester. So enrolled students could choose to take that course to brush up on or learn these fundamentals so everyone was (in theory) on the expected skill level. Other than that there was pretty much no hand holding - 18+ year olds are considered adults after all.
• jampekka 3y ago
  What is this FA? The "problems" of free (publicly funded) higher education have been solved for decades, if not centuries, in many (most?) countries. "Equality of opportunity" becomes even worse a bad joke when a prerequisite for higher education is to be born to well-off parents.
• macleginn 3y ago
  ‘Conversely, if everyone's education were free, then there wouldn’t be a good way to determine a) which specific programs ought to have different prices because of the supply and demand for that kind of credential, b) whether particular people might be better-served by spending their time in different ways, or c) when we're allocating too much of society's resources to education, in the aggregate.’ a) If the education is free, there's no need to determine _prices_ for different programs, is there? There is a need to decide how many places to offer in each programme, but this is an easier problem. b) Particular people may decide for themselves without a prohibitive cost factor, thank you very much. c) When has this ever been a problem? If we want to allocate close to zero to begin with, it is another problem. In other words, free education for all is basically alright. It is hard to attract the best educational talent in this setting because salaries are usually capped and one can always make more in the private sector, but a combination of job security and high prestige is usually enough to have decent staff.
  • einpoklum 3y ago
    > It is hard to attract the best educational talent in this setting because salaries are usually capped and one can always make more in the private sector, but a combination of job security and high prestige is usually enough to have decent staff. "Non-capped" salaries usually mean low median salary and very high salary for a few people with 'star' status for whom strings get pulled. And - that status, even in academia, is rarely due to stellar intellectual achievements. Rather, all sorts of fashionable business-related gurus expect to rake in large amounts of cash. A unionized academic faculty in universities, and a not-corrupt-and-bought union, allow for decent faculty salary. Add the benefit of relative autonomy in choosing one's research directions, and a tenure track that one actually has a chance of getting into, and it's an extremely attractive proposition.
  • jampekka 3y ago
    > It is hard to attract the best educational talent in this setting because salaries are usually capped and one can always make more in the private sector, but a combination of job security and high prestige is usually enough to have decent staff. If you're talking about universities here, the job security is really bad. Until you get tenured that is, but most people doing teaching at universities will never get one. Also most university staff is there foremost to do research, but with some teaching strings attached. I'd say most people in academia aren't in it for the money, and there are a lot easier/safer ways to get money if that's what you want. A part of it may be prestige, but more important are interest in the work and quite a bit of freedom to do what you want and how. And belonging into a community in deeper way than "just doing my job".
• cracrecry 3y ago
  The main problem today in the US education is precisely financing. It created ultra expensive education as Universities do not have to constantly evaluate the quality/price relationship as everybody else needs to. They just raise their prices and people pay(because they do not know how much effort it will take to pay it back). It looks good on paper until the bubble pops. The same happens with Real State.
• HPsquared 3y ago
  Most of the time, a degree is a waste of the student's time. Not to even mention the money aspect. People mostly do them due to peer pressure not actual value. Basically higher education should be reduced 75-90%.
• fallingknife 3y ago
  The first thing should be to incorporate modern technology to cut costs. That means the internet. All publicly funded education should be required to offer their classes and degrees remote. This will barely raise costs and will lower tuition to trivial amounts. At this point there won't need to be any debate about how to fund higher education because with economies of scale permitted by the internet, the costs aren't enough that anybody will want to argue over them. Don't want to offer your degrees to anybody who is willing to pay the price and can pass your tests? Then you are welcome to decline all government funding including student loans.
  • otteromkram 3y ago
    > Don't want to offer your degrees to anybody who is willing to pay the price and can pass your tests? Then you are welcome to decline all government funding including student loans. What a horrible take on the topic at hand. 1. Pay what price? If it's free, then it won't matter. 2. Standardized tests aren't currently pass/fail. 3. Student selection isn't based on tests alone. Under this proposal, why even bother having more than one public post-secondary institution? Now that we only have one publicly-free college, the value of degrees from all of the schools that are fine eschewing government funding are going to skyrocket since graduating public college will be the equivalent of passing high school (in the US). All quality students would flock to those private institutions and be content paying tuition knowing what a huge advantage they'll have in the workforce.
    • fallingknife 3y ago
      The value of a degree is based on exclusivity under any system. We can gatekeep on difficulty to pass and not on money. There is no need for a preselection/admissions process when courses can scale infinitely over the internet. That is a relic of a time where a lecture could only be given in a room with a limited number of seats. The only thing limiting degree issuance can be the ability to pass the classes.
• paulsutter 3y ago
  Expensive universities is a low-AI phenomenon