My mileage does vary, because when I google “largest military,” ALL of the top results qualify by the unit of measurement: by active-duty troops (China), or by total troops including reserves and paramilitaries (that would be DPRK), or by budget (USA), or by firepower (again, USA).
can we stop the side issue?
We as a nation absolutely should look at it from the perspective of where do we get a return on our investment. That return doesn’t have to be monetary though; it might be decided that we want to fund school teachers’ educations fully. Or that we want to fund social work degrees, or certain STEM degrees and not others (for example, petroleum engineering seems akin to being a dinosaur vet at this point). Or other degrees- not sure why we’d need to fund MBAs or finance degrees, for example, but it might be a good thing to fully fund other sciences.
This is an expenditure that we don’t currently have in the budget- it seems absurd to just proclaim “Free college for all!” without considering what the government and by extension, the people will get out of it, and trying to tailor the system to maximize the benefit to all. That’s not good stewardship of the people’s money, and seems a lot more like some sort of liberal populist appeal for votes, rather than an actual legitimate plan.
There have certainly been periods of time when the US desperately needed and could not find people with knowledge of different corners of the world. The scramble to find maps and information about the Pacific islands during World War II, for example, is well-known, and since the 1950s the feds have funded “National Resource Centers” in specific areas of the world. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, passed in reaction to Sputnik and other Soviet technological advances, included in addition to STEM funding a section (Title VI) specifically to provide funding for language and area studies, including Russian language studies.
The real solution is to have students exchange tuition for some form of national service - work X years (for pay) for the government or for a nongovernment organization. Put those finance and business majors in the IRS or OMB, the Russian literature majors can either work at the CIA or teach English to immigrants. If someone isn’t willing to give up the first 5-7-10 years of their career in exchange for free tuition, that’s okay, they can test their value in the open market.
And what is your definition of a positive return on our investment when the outcome is intangible like knowledge?
Which is basically what I’m proposing- periodically there would be some kind of non partisan commission, or a bipartisan committee that would set the priorities for this sort of thing for some period of years, based on what the country’s perceived needs are in terms of competitiveness, public service, public health, military needs, etc…
Right now, from what I understand we need health care professionals. Not in an acute COVID sort of way, but in a longer-term way. So it would make sense to prioritize that sort of education. Similarly, US companies have long griped about a shortage of technology workers, so prioritize that. Maybe a decade from now, it’ll be teachers, or marine biologists, or meteorologists, or something else, and that’ll be the time to reprioritize.
Maybe some majors will never get Federal funding- so be it. It’s not something owed to anyone- the government would be doing this because it gets something out of it, not out of some kind of ideological goodness. Higher education isn’t a right, not like primary education. And I don’t think it should be; we need non-college graduates to do a whole bunch of jobs- making college more common isn’t going to change that. I’m even amenable to the idea of including trade schools in that funding scheme; if we need more bricklayers and diesel mechanics, and less English majors, that’s where we should put our money.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. We don’t need to micromanage specific arts degrees too much - people with arts degrees fill some jobs. We don’t necessarily need less English degrees. But we can have some measure of which tradespeople, engineers or teachers we need in the next few years and pay for those educations.
I don’t know that I trust a commission, even an allegedly bipartisan or nonpartisan one, to accurately forecast what the country will need. Certainly some areas are obvious: public health, for example. What would such a commission have concluded about the need for computer programmers, though?
So you’re saying that some sort of hypothetical commission will be worse than the aggregate choices of a bunch of 17-18 year old high school graduates in terms of attempting to steer higher education a little bit toward something more beneficial to the nation as a whole.
My point isn’t that we need less English degrees, but rather that there’s no need for the government to pay for them. We get plenty with the current system, but if cost is an issue, maybe those people should consider majors that are funded by the government in part or in full. Same for any other major - if partial funding isn’t enough, then consider another.
I think we’re actually on the same page; I’m not saying we need to do away with English majors, just that the government doesn’t need to be subsidizing them, while things like say… certain STEM graduates might be something the government perceives as needed, so they’d get subsidized or funded outright. That would apply to ANY degree- we might need more English majors at some point, so they’d get subsidized when that’s the case. And we might need less computer programmers at the same time, so they’d be removed from the subsidy list. Nothing about what I’m saying would prevent people from paying outright, or getting loans or whatever they currently do. It’s just that some people in certain fields might get their degrees paid for, and that would depend on how vital those degrees are perceived to be by the government.
I wonder if you’re overestimating the connection between degree and destiny: the correlation between what a person majors in and what they end up doing for a career.
Suppose there is a need for computer programmers. An English major who can program might be in higher demand than a CS major who can program.
I don’t know… everyone who I went to school with ended up using their degrees, except some of them who ended up going on to graduate/professional school in something else. (i.e. people with political science degrees who went to law school, or microbiology students who went to med school, etc…)
Sure, but in what situation is that a good use of the government’s money to fund an English major’s degree if they’re going to program for a living?
And I’m failing to see the situation where the English major would be a more in-demand choice for being a programmer than a CS major. Even in situations where the English literature knowledge would be handy, they’re probably better off as an analyst of some kind, instead of a coder.
I’m saying that where there is money to be distributed, never underestimate the power of some people/groups to convince themselves and others that what benefits them benefits the nation.
Figuring out what to program, keeping the programming on track, and determining whether what has been programmed meets the project goals are at least as valuable skills as the ability to program itself. Business analysis and project management are skills that don’t correlate neatly with college majors, though. Many business analysts did come out of CompSci programs, others come from a business background, and still others come out of subject specialties; however, some of the best I’ve known came out of a liberal arts background with the ability to communicate orally and in writing, ask the right questions, and think long and hard about “why” and not just “how.”
My Art History degree with a Woman’s Studies minor also includes a History minor with a concentration in Russian. In 1988 when I graduated, the people in the Russian History and Language programs were getting snapped up to work for the NSA or CIA like CRAZY. Not one of us left without being approached.
Oh absolutely. The closest thing I can think of that might align would be MIS degrees in a school’s college of business. Even there, those degrees aren’t really geared toward being a BA or PM, they’re geared more toward being a generic IT person- i.e. not a programmer, but still technical.
But that’s not programming. For strict coding, you probably want the CS grad- we are taught stuff that’s very important for writing good code and designing good solutions, but that’s nowhere near in the scope of your average programmer training course.
So, what majors should receive government funding to make sure we have adequate numbers of BA/PM types?
First off, lets tackle the related issue of why college has become so expensive in the private sector. The recent rise in the cost of college education is actually a result of the government subsidizing student loans. Making nearly unlimited loans available to nearly everyone caused the demand for college to increase drastically while the supply (at least in the short term) stayed the same. Basic economics this means the price is going to go way up.
Also the administration of a university is always going to have ideas for more programs or buildings that they believe will make their campus better. So if its possible to raise revenue its the rational thing for them to do as long as possible. Because there’s no limit on the amount the government will lend the money is always available so there’s no incentive for colleges to rein in their spending.
If the government gets out of the student loan market Colleges will no longer charge insanely high tuition. By eliminating the governments ability to back student loans, 17 and 18 year olds will no longer be able to get $40,000 loans each year. That means colleges won’t have new students. But they need students, so they’ll lower their tuition to whatever the bank is willing to loan a student instead of government ‘assurances’. Now your child can get a college degree for a fraction of the cost and enter the work force with little to no debt.
However, making college free is not the solution. It will destroy the quality of education as no one will have an incentive to provide it. If free, people will over consume it to the tune of billions of dollars that can’t possibly be covered by any reasonable taxes, as such the only option will be to reduce quality. Some degrees are already all but useless and their continued existence as options is largely due to the subsidized student loans.
We can see parallels here with free k-12. The public school system spends 2 to 3 times more money – per student – than the private school system and it is near universally agreed that private schools provide a better education. Socializing the school system will at best provide meritocracy at absorbent costs and at worst prove fiscally unsustainable.
The solution is a true free market system where people can make the choice if they want to spend their resources going to college (there are legitimate reasons to not go, not everyone needs to) and without public funding universities will be forced to cater to the students needs in a way they do not now.
IS IT near universally agreed?
Is the quality of education in other places with free/nominal cost university education “destroyed”? That must come as a surprise to France, Germany, Denmark…
One of them is.
They also have vastly lower percentage of their population getting that university education. If they were trying to put 60+ percent of their of age population through those same colleges they would have to cut quality (or spend twice as much money).
Eliminating half of the college population would certainly make the program more popular in the US but I would be strongly that it would be poor and minority kids in the half cut and rich and white (and asian) kids in the half that are still going to college. We’d probably lower our social mobility further as well.
Not a fan of social work?