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Financing by taxes but having the state determine which degrees are "useful" is a poor combination that falls victim to all the usual mistakes of centrally plan
by dmurray 3y ago
Financing by taxes but having the state determine which degrees are "useful" is a poor combination that falls victim to all the usual mistakes of centrally planned economies. Is the Education Department bureaucrat in charge of deciding which degrees are useless really going to completely align with your narrow view of the world?
If you want to defund the areas of education that don't provide value, you should favour less government intervention, not more. Let the market fund education by having employers or financiers preferentially fund (through loans, or otherwise as discussed in TFA) the students who are more likely to enrich them later on.
- jampekka 3y agoEducation Department or equivalents sure do set targets at least for professional degrees, at least here in Finland. For others a bit less so and universities have quite a bit of autonomy on what the exact subject fields are. One easy "market" way of doing some selection is to drop subjects which don't get enough applicants. A lot of education doesn't necessarily produce "value" in short term bean counter sense, but are very important to for example retain culture and knowledge. Also, to apparently great shock of many, there are a lot of people who don't select what to study based on what is "more likely to enrich then later on". Most people don't care much about being rich, and the ones that do are probably quite miserble.