What would be the incentive to ever graduate.
As I remember college life was pretty good. Think about if it wasn’t costing you anything.
Well, in Greece there was an incentive not to graduate, for sure! The Army!
But get this: also in Greece, the gov’t didn’t start taxing a building until the building was complete. Consequently, no one ever completed their building! One wall wasn’t painted! Gudgreef!
I’d like to think we can improve on the above!
Well, if they are making millions, that means that they’re at a very high tax bracket, and will more than pay for their college education through income taxes.
I see your point, Gilligan, but the benefit to the people in low paying jobs would be that their kids could be in law school right along with Gates’ kids.
Education should be like a career, with goals guided by ability and desire, and by the needs of society. What I mean by the needs of society is what jobs the marketplace will likely support.
Oh yeah, federal in scope and maybe local in administration. So a student from Arkansas could go to Michigan State, if that would best serve his/her goals.
Living costs can be worked out.
Peace,
mangeorge
Jeez, will you social engineers never stop? A free education for all - who pays for it? What happens to the tax base when 50% more people stay in school and become tax burdens rather than going to work and becoming revenue sources?
What if there aren’t enough teachers to adequately teach this huge influx of students?
What do we do when there is a massive shortage of general laborers and tradespeople like plumbers and insulators and carpenters?
What makes you think that subsidized higher education will result in a more educated populace in the first place? The net result might be a watering-down of the education system so that the brightest don’t reach their full potential and the rest just coast through studying goofball subjects. There’s enough of that crap in the university system already.
When you subsidize something, you interfere with natural market forces that want to allocate resources according to supply-and-demand. You get oversupplies and shortages. Quality generally suffers in subsidized industries.
The economy is a highly complex beast that does not respond well to commands from a central authority. The law of unintended consequences often causes results exactly opposite to the original intentions. I’m not sure I want a university system that is crowded with people who are there for a free holiday. I don’t want my kids to sit in classes with 1000 other kids who don’t really care about the subject, rather than 200 kids who are paying their own way and therefore motivated to learn.
What happens to the market value of a university education when every guy and his dog has one?
What happens to those people who don’t make the cut for the free education? Will the same educational opportunities still be open to them as exist now?
Anyway, I would be very hesitant to equate a university education with being educated. If all you learn in your life is what you soaked up in a four-year liberal arts degreee while concentrating on partying and getting laid, you’re going to be pretty ignorant. On the other hand, if you have a probing mind and a desire to learn things throughout your life, you’ll be educated.
Someone mentioned that Greece has a completely free university system. I haven’t noticed a huge influx of Greek scholars in the world, nor have I noticed Greece becoming the new technological superpower. Perhaps that free education isn’t worth as much as you might think.
BTW, there have been many recent criticisms of our current university system that may be the result of the amount of state funding they currently get. It turns out that our universities are overcrowded already, which is driving down the quality of education, yet there are shortages of students and resources in some of the toughest disciplines like engineering and the natural sciences. It would seem that a lot of subsidized students are taking easier degrees and diverting resources away from the other departments. Under a completely free system this may become much worse.
Resist the temptation to jump on the bandwagon of quick-fixes and ‘good ideas’ that require large government command forces.
To jump back to a point from a bit above:
The above logic is only valid if you assume that Harvard currently has the $10,000,000,000 sitting around in a heap in a big vault gathering dust in case of a rainy day. Rather, they have most likely already invested the money and are using the proceeds to supplement the money they get from tuition. I’ve never understood how it is possible, but tuition generally does not cover the entire cost of educating a student.
What you are proposing is simply a transfer of wealth, although instead of the usual transfer from the richer to the poorer, it is in effect a transfer from the poorer to the richer. I realize that isn’t the intent, which is the transfer from the less-intelligent and non-achievers to the intelligent and achievers. It seeems reasonable to suppose that the intelligent and achievers are going to be richer than the others.
The justification for this transfer of wealth is that college educated people give back more to society, in the form of more taxes, hiring people, etc. This is the same justification used for corporate welfare. After all, big businesses are the ones creating wealth and jobs, and paying lots of taxes. They should be the ones getting the taxpayers’ money. Why give it to struggling, working-class single mothers; what have they done for us lately?
You might suppose that the poor would be the main benefactors of your policy, but I don’t think that would be the case. It will take me some time and research to back this up, but I believe statistics would support this correlation: that even after cost of higher ed is removed as a factor, students from lower income areas are less likely to qualify for college than those from higher income areas. There are a number of reasons why this would be so - lower quality schools, cultural disapproval of academic achievement, lack of family support, etc. Whatever the reasons, the fact is that the wealthier you already are, the more likely you are to get in on the “free” money. People of lower income would end up subsidising the higher education (and subsequent higher incomes) of the wealthy.
Now it’s true that under this proposal there would be many poorer people who qualify, and would get a higher ed that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. That’s a worthy goal, but there are other ways to achieve it besides this one.
I might think differently about your proposal if I thought there was some huge crisis in higher ed. But I don’t see any crisis; what I see instead in this country is thousands of colleges, trade schools, and technical schools competing for millions of adults who feel that a higher education is worth the price to them. You want to tell them, “No, it isn’t worth the price to you; we’ll make someone else pay for it.”
No such plan could ever or should ever be implemented. (My praise before was half-joking, and based on the fact that right now I wish it were possible).
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Before such a plan could or should be implemented, the lower educational system would have to be standardized. Otherwise, as many people have already pointed out, the rich kids who are getting the expensive high school education will go to the big colleges on the poor man’s dime. A larger applicant pool would make admissions more competitive, and the kids who went to the dirt-poor high schools would get aced out. Now, if the public education system were to be standardized, then we might talk (private schools for the rich would still be a problem, but not as big a problem).
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It would be largely anticapitalist. Private colleges and universities are private institutions, and the government has no right to tell them how to run their business, or how much to charge. And it certainly has no business in stepping in and (in essence) federalizing them.
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The quality of education would hit the crapper. Think about it. The quality of education at private institutions is based on the fact that they’re private (I am well aware that there are a number or quality state schools in this country). Why do people with doctorates teach in universities and not high schools? Because nobody who’s worked that hard to get where they are wants to be a government employee. The faculties of these institutions would suffer a huge blow. In addition, we’d have to assume that a byproduct of federalizing higher education would be standardization. The cash would be schilled out equally (per student I suppose) to Harvard as well as Marlboro U.
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Oxford would immediately become the clear-cut best school in the world. We can’t allow this. The basis of our entire relationship with the British is that we both know that Americans are superior in every way.
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The ability of schools to attract talented people, and the competition between schools to enroll talented people, would be subverted. I’m specifically referring to athletes. Collegiate athletics would become terribly disinteresting.
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” -Winston Churchill
Sage wrote:
Oh, dear God. Will someone please peel me off the ceiling?
Tell you what, I would be willing to teach Sage the value of value. Free.
Georgia opffers free tuition for students with a “b” average, and let me tell you, the idea gives me the willies. The biggest problem I see just off hand is that “qualified” is pretty subjective. Grade inflation has already drained our education system of any trace of prestige; with $12,000 worth of tuition on the line I honestly expect to see teachers being shot at by irate parents because they [the teachers] assigned low grades.
The interest payments on the 10 billion Harvard’s got in the bank are undoubtably spoken for. All universities manage scores of endowments in percisely this fashion. It usually takes up the labor of a whole department. Even at my small public school, there are many scholorships that are paid for by the intrest on some donation earmarked for a specific purpose. We have a similar endowment for our history forum and other such activities.
Furthermore, Ivy leage schools are private institutions, and seperate from this debate; their bank rolls and how they choose to select and finance their students is moot.
There are plenty of ways for people to go to college today. It may well require going into debt, sometimes seriously, and you may have to go to one of the public universities that Rousseau snifts at, (I myself have been impressed at the quality of the two public universities I have attended) but it can be done. Student loans are a pretty good deal–low interest, deferred payments, etc. People go into much higher debt to buy a mid-line car, and no one sees that as undue hardship.
I was wondering when we were gonna get an “Oh, dear God.” 
How many disclaimers do I have to put in my posts? Sheesh.
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” -Winston Churchill
Okaaay, as a student who is about $15 grand in the hole, and actually has about another year to go, I’m perhaps not entirely objective. But I actually think this is a bad idea. Such a program would be grossly expensive, and the money would be better spent on improving lower education, thus preparing more people to even think about going to college. However, TPTB have been reducing the amounts of cash offered for student loans and grants. It’s no longer true that anyone who wants to go to college can do so. I’ve seen many a bright student have to drop out because their parents started making a little more money, thus disqualifying them for certain vital aid programs. I don’t have a problem with loans, but I, of course prefer grants. But even loans are always there when you need them. And that’s sad – I mean, it’s all going to be paid back anyway, with interest. It’s not the like the government is losing anything.
<exit soapbox>
A hush fell over the courtroom, killing six.
At one time, California did essentially what this thread’s original post suggested. Anyone who exited high school in the top x% of their class was guaranteed admission to the University of California; the next y% were guaranteed admission to the California State University; in either case, other than insignificant fees, there was little or no tuition.
Needless to say, this system has suffered as a result of the most obvious of difficulties: getting voters to be willing to pay for the ever increasing cost of higher education. For reasons not worth debating here (different thread likely needed), the cost of a college education continues to increase at a rate substantially higher than the inflation rate. This is true across the spectrum of educational institutes. As a result, a student at the University of California now pays a pretty substantial annual tuition, in addition to fees. Any attempt to drive this amount back down to almost zero would result in significant tax increases or reduction in spending on other programs, something Californian’s have rejected repeatedly in the last 20 years.
Let us also acknowledge a basic difficulty with the premise: who judges who is ‘qualified’ to get the free educational benefit? How would you establish the entitlement? If it is established by grades, you would have instant pressure to inflate grades (as indeed has happened in the past in states with GPA requirements for admission to state schools). If it is established by tests, then how do you avoid the subtle biases that tests contain, which often result in lower scores for underpriviledged children, females, minorities, etc? Ohio right now is in a growing revolt over the simple requirement that 4th graders pass a reading proficiency test in order to be promoted to 5th grade. This is perceived as substantially unfair for a number of reasons, including the troubles mentioned above with standardized testing. And we won’t even go into the issue of creativity and how teaching to pass standardized tests stifles it. And what do you do with your musically creative people? Your artists?
On top of all this, there is a basic underlying premise to the proposition in the OP: that somehow academically gifted people deserve something that less academically able people don’t (namely, in this case, easy access to higher education). Excuse me, but who the hell said that I was more entitled to be given a college education because I maintained a 3.7 GPA and scored over 1500 on my SAT’s (combined total)? Is my sister somehow less entitled for the fact she managed only a 3.5 and a combined 1350? What about my equally intelligent brother, who disliked formal education and managed only a 2.0? Given the significant effect on the ability to obtain a job that the conclusion of a degree in higher education can have, why should we make it easier for those who do well in school to gain even a greater advantage? If anything, shouldn’t we be working to make it easier for those who are less able to do well in school to aspire to complete a college education? What entitles the intelligent to free public money??
Educational spending in this country is having troubles enough; let’s not add to those troubles with divisive ideas about how to confer benefits on a select few while significantly increasing the cost to society as a whole to maintain the system.
While the bit about the fees is certainly not true any longer (I graduated from the University of California last week, and am $20,000 in debt), the part about percentages is. The top 10% of California high school graduates are guaranteed admittance into the UC. I was working in the UCSC Office of Admissions until, well, last week, and we were getting applications sent to us from other campuses (mostly Berkeley and LA) of people who were not accepted at the campuses they applied to, but were still in the top 10% and had to be accepted somewhere. Because of the growing population in California, it won’t be too long before there isn’t enough room for the top 10%, which is why the UC is building a ninth undergrad campus in Merced, due to open in a few years. Which is one of the many reasons the state can’t afford to pay everyone’s college tuition.
It should also be noted that in countries where university education is free, taxes are exorbitant. I believe sales tax in Germany is 17%, and that’s one of the lowest in Europe (according to a German guy I know…Europeans can correct me if my info is wrong). Can you imagine the uproar if the federal government announced that there would be a nation-wide sales tax of 20% to pay for universal college education? I doubt that’s even legal.
Go Banana Slugs!!!
(From someone who used to live in Watsonville)
Just to clear up an obvious misunderstanding regarding the part I show in bold: The premise was not that the academically “gifted” like DSYoung deserve something more. Rather, that students who are basicaly not flunking out but maintaining a satisfactory grades can continue with their education.
Many here make fine points showing likely problems instituting such a system and Kylas’s comments about California are well taken.
I was hoping there would be more postive views on such a system.
Oh, forgot, DS! Re: the musical and artistic talents - they would pursue their education in those areas.
It’s not exactly the system we have now is it Tom? Apart from the introduction of (partial) tuition fees there has been the gradual erosion of the maintenance grant to the stage where there is no such thing. All I’m saying is that there is still a huge financial aspect to studying in the UK, perhaps not as much as the US but it certainly isn’t simply a case of meeting a certain academic standard. I find the lowering of entry requirements both saddening and infuriating. When I applied to the University of Glasgow (in 1994) they required 4 B-grade SCE Highers. I actually think the entry requirements have gone up for my particular course (Computing Science) because of the number of applications but in general there seems to be a downward trend. Won’t be long before we have a generation of idiot graduates walking around messing the country up
Thanks for the comparison, MadHun.
Let me ask you, would you rather see the US system in Britain? Do you have some ideas how your system could be improved? How would you begin to institute a better system?