So what do you all think?
What if anyone in the US who wants to go to college, and has the requirements like good grades, could get free tuition to college?
Also how does this all work in other countries?
Personally why I like the idea, I think their could be alot of issues for example:
So what do you all think?
It has certainly been tried in a number of places. I remember the City University of New York had it for several years–but had to drop it because of budget problems. And when they dropped it there was a substantial drop in the number of students.
http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/forum/2011/10/12/when-tuition-at-cuny-was-free-sort-of/
I wouldn’t think there would need to be any changes in admissions criteria. I’d happily teach at a free university, and probably pick up another degree myself.
Surely Americans can’t be intrinsically too incompetent to achieve what other countries have already done. It would require the political will.
Don’t bet against either the incompetence (look who was elected President) or the selfishness (look who was elected President) of the American people.
I agree that there are some folks who are stupidly (in my opinion) resisting America’s joining the rest of the civilized world by investing in its people.
Maybe y’all should start with baby steps, Y’know, try and even out education funding across the board for public school first. So ALL kids have access to a decent basic, education. Instead of kids in rich neighbourhoods getting great schools and kids in poor neighbourhoods get really crappy schools. One gets an NFL quality football program with paid coaches while across town schools in poor neighbourhoods can’t get decent textbooks and have no arts or sports funding.
Free university isn’t any help to the disenfranchised who are denied access to the basic education required to secure admission to any university.
If you don’t address that, free uni is just another white privilege effectively.
Definitely a good call to raise the bar on all schools from the get go.
While I won’t suggest the OP is baiting the hook by using the phrase “free college”, I’ve had discussions with some less than forthright conservatives who want only to pounce on the idea of free anything. And they have a point - nothing is really free, it’s a question of how it’s paid for.
So having said that, I would gladly agree to pay for fully subsidized college for all through taxes.
It would be a hard sell to tell people “Well, we’re glad you paid for your own college - and please continue to pay off those loans if you’re not done with that yet since this announcement will not benefit you in any monetary way - but with this exciting new program we’re going to allow you to pay for other people’s educations too! Isn’t that wonderful?”
California’s Community Colleges were free of tuition charges for many many decades … and both state universities and UC campuses were dirt cheap to attend … my understanding is that has changed now since it was quite expensive to the tax payers … free tuition = higher taxes … it’s a choice …
We have “free college” in many parts of Mississippi – not exactly a hotbed of progressive political ideas – in that many community colleges offer free tuition for local students. (Often with some asterisks attached; e.g., at our local community college the students have to apply for all the scholarships and federal and state grants they are eligible for FIRST, after which the college will step up to cover the balance, and they have to maintain a certain GPA while enrolled.)
I think it is a good idea with some caveats. The main problem that I see is that the community colleges aren’t always providing students with the best education (both because they’re overcrowded and underfunded, and because their funding formula places too much emphasis on retaining / graduating students and not enough on producing graduates who do well at a four-year school, so the incentives are to pass students even when they shouldn’t). As that is the case, I think bright students from low-income families sometimes aren’t encouraged to look beyond the community colleges, even though they would benefit from being in a more academically rigorous environment, while some of the less-academically-inclined ones are given a false impression of their chances of success at a four-year institution. However, it definitely puts a college degree within reach of students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it.
New York state schools just introduced “free” tuition for state residents, when you commit to living and working in New York for as long as you took the tuition.
Tennessee offers 2 years free, at a Community College, or Technical School.
There are a few, easy to meet requirements.
It will change the face of this State, over ten years.
I remember hearing discussions that tuition fees are not the main barrier to getting lower income students to attend post-secondary education. E.g., there already exist a variety of scholarships or student loan programs that lower income students qualify for, but that doesn’t help if received poor-quality high school education.
If that’s the case, then wouldn’t this just be a subsidy for middle income families?
That’s where I come down.
When we manage to graduate 95% of students (right now its around 80%) from high school (which assumes 5% of people have issues that make graduating very difficult that public high schools can’t address - like they are severely disabled), we can start talking about “free” college education.
When we fund our current public school system so that there is an adequate number of books for students regardless of the district, so that their facilities have adequate heat in the winter - we can start talking about “free” college education.
When we fund our current public school system so that students who can handle college level material have access to AP courses or dual enrollment (and teachers who can teach that material) so they aren’t wasting two years with math that they already know and English coursework that they’ve already mastered, then we can talk about “free” college -
And at that point we will need a lot less of it. Because the education people get through high school will have prepared them for college - and some of them will already have AA degrees (about 5% of my kid’s high school class graduates with AA degrees through dual enrollment programs).
And as a white person in a diverse neighborhood with college age kids, it drives me bonkers that my peer parents are complaining about college costs when they have been buying a new $50k SUV every three years since their kids were born (in many cases two, because his and hers new cars is a must). “Free” college is such a white privilege need in the U.S. And its also an “urban/suburban” privilege - free college means free college tuition, but if you live in rural Nebraska, you don’t have access to a college with an affordable commute or without moving - unless you try for online learning or something.
If you get good marks and have good ACT or SAT scores, college is free or cheap. It all depends on the student wanting it. If they don’t have incentive they won’t succeed, throwing money at it won’t fix that.
I believe there are about 20 million Americans in college at any time. 15 million in public, 5 million in private.
If you don’t subsidize the ones in private college or the ones that attend an out of state public college, I assume that works out to maybe ~12 million Americans who attend an in state public college.
Give each one about $8000 in subsidies, and that should cover most of their tuition (that’d cover tuition but books for community college). That works out to about $100 billion a year.
A big sum of money, but not the biggest we’ve ever spent (the Iraq war cost more).
And there are about 150 million people working (nonfarm), so that’s just shy of $700/person per year if split evenly among the employed.
I’m guessing college *could *cost less while still covering its core education mission, but I don’t have sufficient information to dissect the current costs.
And I have bigger priorities for the government to spend money on - the aforementioned public school system. Health care. Infrastructure improvements. Water for Flint, Michigan and restored electricity to Puerto Rico. Free college is somewhere in the double digits for spending priorities on my own list.
Can we do it? Sure - whats the opportunity cost?