College
College should not be free
• It still wouldn’t be free just a redistribution of who is paying
• Doesn’t address the main issue of the high price and what is the cause. State budget cuts are mainly to blame
• How many countries do free college
• Make student loans easier to obtain, and with more time to pay back, and lower interest rate.
• the second big problem, however, is that I think we should get more cynical than Bruenig does. If the level of subsidy were increased enough to eliminate tuition, the faculty and administrators of public universities would still thirst for more money. A logical place to raise the money would be—tuition. After all, a college degree is a valuable commodity. And the kids in college are mostly from families with above-average incomes. Having eliminated tuition, the tuition would simply come back. In exchange, you'd get more tenure-track faculty, more administrators, more weird perks for university presidents, nicer facilities, etc.
• there is already a cheaper option community college
• it forces the students to obtain higher grades in high school for a possible scholarship option
• But I think we should loop this back around to where we started. I agree with Bady that there's an important sense in which the best-known public institutions of higher education aren't public. But it isn't that they aren't free. National Parks aren't free. But they're still public institutions. Because they're open to the public. Community colleges are also open to the public. But schools that only let you in if you have high SAT scores—whoever owns them and whatever they charge—aren't public in this sense. And in a world where the cost of financing health care and retirement for an aging society is pressuring public budgets, I'd make them stand behind other more broadly public forms of education for money.
• It still wouldn’t be free just a redistribution of who is paying
• Doesn’t address the main issue of the high price and what is the cause. State budget cuts are mainly to blame
• How many countries do free college
• Make student loans easier to obtain, and with more time to pay back, and lower interest rate.
• the second big problem, however, is that I think we should get more cynical than Bruenig does. If the level of subsidy were increased enough to eliminate tuition, the faculty and administrators of public universities would still thirst for more money. A logical place to raise the money would be—tuition. After all, a college degree is a valuable commodity. And the kids in college are mostly from families with above-average incomes. Having eliminated tuition, the tuition would simply come back. In exchange, you'd get more tenure-track faculty, more administrators, more weird perks for university presidents, nicer facilities, etc.
• there is already a cheaper option community college
• it forces the students to obtain higher grades in high school for a possible scholarship option
• But I think we should loop this back around to where we started. I agree with Bady that there's an important sense in which the best-known public institutions of higher education aren't public. But it isn't that they aren't free. National Parks aren't free. But they're still public institutions. Because they're open to the public. Community colleges are also open to the public. But schools that only let you in if you have high SAT scores—whoever owns them and whatever they charge—aren't public in this sense. And in a world where the cost of financing health care and retirement for an aging society is pressuring public budgets, I'd make them stand behind other more broadly public forms of education for money.