Comment by Aeolun
Comment by Aeolun 4 days ago
You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost too. Nearly all of Europe does, I believe.
Comment by Aeolun 4 days ago
You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost too. Nearly all of Europe does, I believe.
That's not exactly true. Funnily enough, you are extremely dependent on your sociological background. If you come from a poor family and do very well, you'll get a full ride for sure. But if you do well but come from a well-off family that refuse to pay for your education, you are fucked. It's only university attendance that is (mostly) free. you still need to finance housing and life costs. Since most good universities are in expensive cities and student loans are not much of a thing, it is an extremely selective process that targets both class standing (from a money standpoint) and parental implication.
There was a study on one of the most selective school in France and actually diversity of background has gone down in the last 20 years. Europe is highly politicised and it was always about selecting for ideologically compatible behavior. Otherwise education wouldn't need so much government intervention/support, even if said education would be paid for by the taxpayer (everyone could get some amounts of credits, that they could spend on their institution of choice).
America used to do that, but Jewish students started taking (and doing well on) the test, and later Black and Asian students had the audacity to be brilliant too. This led to America's "holistic" college admissions process.
For what it's worth, the USA isn't unique in adapting admissions to reject an unwanted minority. The most interesting mechanism has to be Moscow State University's Jewish Problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
The Chinese national entrance exam (gaokao?) is notoriously grueling, but doing well pretty much guarantees you a spot in a top university. Would have been useful to me, having grabbed a middle-of-the-road SAT score for Ivies but having failed to apply to one. There's definitely a multi-pronged strategy for ensuring exclusivity.
> You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost
This isn’t socially useful.
And what we're doing now is? Telling 17-year-olds to take on six figures of debt and then replacing them with ChatGPT while making it impossible to discharge their debt?
What is obvious and what would be hugely socially useful would be to have a completely online, completely free accredited option for degrees that don't need labs. That would cause downward pressure on all of tuition outside the top universities.
The price of college at this point is a ridiculous value proposition to the average student. Who cares about the top students and the most gifted people. They will be fine regardless. The average student is getting crushed and ripped off blind.
Ripping off entire generations of young people is really stupid and is going to have devastating long run social consequences.
The people who can be replaced by ChatGPT are the ones who treated their time in college as "just getting a piece of paper". They paid handsomely for a chance at drinking from the fountain of knowledge and instead did a rinse and spit.
Just because Comp Sci and many STEM degrees in general are losing value does not mean that university overall is not worthwhile.
This is not something that can be measured ahead of time, what someone does with their education.
Not sure what you mean by that, many other degrees still have plenty of value because they teach "soft skills" that are more broadly applicable and more difficult to automate. Hard skills always get automated away.
That's easily solved with labor market reform. First implement federal and state law that requires every worker performing any profession to have a college degree in that field.
Then companies are evaluated on how much work is produced in their business (for example by revenue), and they have to either contract the equivalent number of people with college degrees, or even better - license the degree from a college graduate. This can also be used to pay for tuition. The student gets a mortgage that pays for her education when she enters college, and then the lender has the right to part of either her salary, or the licensing fee for her degree to companies that need it, or to people who need it.
Let's say a chef who hasn't gone to culinary college, he can pay a culinary college graduate 20% of his salary to use their degree, which is a professional license. Or a company needing programmers. They can hire immigrants or an AI to program, and pay licensing fees to computer science graduates who have the degree.
Think what I thriving market for banks, investors, and insurance companies! They will be able to package these licenses and offer them on the market to individual workers or to companies for competitive and efficient rates. The college student of course gets rewarded as well, as they can rent out their degree, or even sell it. So a good student can get several degrees, and have a very good income from both his own work and from degree licensing fees. Of course we'll make sure that students belonging to an oppressed class be allowed to license their one degree to several places at the same time.
Did Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education?
Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
Europe has a much lower expenditure per student compared to the US.
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-crazy-amount-america-spends...
It does. In large part due to Baumol's cost disease - higher overall incomes in productive sector like tech drive up costs for sector with low productivity growth - so professors and admin staff in US make 2x salaries compared to Europe (cost of living adjusted). Also, have you seen EU student amenities and dorm sizes?
I'm trying to follow you. I don't get how Baumol's has a higher degree of effectiveness in the US than it does in the EU? Are you saying there are more tech companies and therefore tech roles in the US than EU and thus those drive up non-tech wages even though they aren't as productive?
From what I understand European education and degree programs are typically much more structured and narrow, and thus finish a lot faster. A student who finishes K-Ph.D. in the US will have a lot more breadth of exposure than such a student in most of Europe, if I recall what I read on the topic a while ago correctly.
When used in a social context, "free" has a different meaning than in many other contexts. It does not mean, for example, "there is no cost for this thing". Rather, it means "the person receiving this thing is not responsible for paying the costs associated with it (at least not at the time)".
Free health care doesn't mean "nobody gets paid to provide health care", it means "patients do not pay for health at the point of service".
If you'd prefer that we use some other term to describe this, please suggest it. I do find it interesting that the Scottish NHS uses "No fees at point of service" as part of their branding (or did, back in 2019).
That's what taxes are for. Subsidizing public good.
Affordable access to good education is a good outcome from the heavy taxation I pay.
For sure. The main benefit is that it allows smart, hardworking but poor students to get a degree and utilize their brainpower productively for the benefit of all. That's great.
Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).
Just going to point out that this is semantic hair-splitting that usually comes from opponents of governments providing for the social welfare. Not saying you're doing that, but it's a thing that happens.
And nobody thinks free education doesn't cost anything, just like people don't think the military doesn't cost anything. Somehow, though, there is endless trillions for "defense", and a little moth flies out of the wallet when it's for something that doesn't involve drones.
Absolutely. I never would say it is "free". But in many ways it is a matter of what one values.
I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.
People without a degree: Work and pay high taxes for years while their peers are studying, and then continue to pay high taxes to pay for the high salaries of degree holders who used their degrees to get government "jobs".
People with a degree: Get free education and free stipends, then get paid by the tax payers for the rest of their lives in their cushy government "jobs".
Free at point of consumption. Anybody with half a brain understands that’s what’s meant when somebody says “free” education or “free” healthcare.
The taxation is conditional on earning enough income though, which aligns incentives better.
Was it much more subsidized in the US when it was much cheaper, though?
I'd reword the question: "was college paid for via higher income taxes for graduates (and others) or via a more direct approach of student loan taking?". I believe the latter but I don't see the fundamental difference. It's the same student loan but hidden from sight, as it's packaged as higher tax %
> don't see the fundamental difference
You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.
If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?
That doesn't have prestige value. Prestige comes from scarcity and the ability to exclude the lower caste.
If people want to play those exclusivity games that's up to them. What's wrong is asking the taxpayer to fund it under the false mask that the entire product is education.