Additionally everyone that has finished High School should be accepted into any state-funded university. You can seed out the unqualified students during the first two semesters.
Of course, the problem you mentioned still exists - a lot, if not most of people are not cut out for higher education, and since there is no financial barrier to entry, why aren't people spending 3+ years on taxpayer's dime doing nothing?
Well, I believe there are two mechanisms at work here - it's stupidly hard to get into any university, even a relatively poor one. You need fantastically good results on the high school diploma or you are not even considered.
Second mechanism - first year is the sieve to rule out who is not cut out for higher education. It has a reputation for being harshly difficult, and it's not unheard of university courses failing or just losing 90% of all students that have enrolled in their first year. If you come to university with an attitude that you are going to party and play games, you will be out by the end of the first semester. Then, if you do reach the end, there's no "grades" on your diploma. You can't graduate with a low score so to speak - you need to have absolutely pristine record to actually graduate. People have finished their 3-4 years and have been re-taking final exams for years just because you need to get something stupid like 90%+ score to actually pass.
In comparison, I was shocked by education in country like the UK - in here, first year of uni is almost treated like kindergarten. It's not meant to be difficult. You are not meant to be treating it seriously. It's the year when you are supposed to get the partying out of your system and enjoy yourself. The grades from 1st year don't even count towards your final degree. The only way to fail in 1st year would be to assault a lecturer or something. Then anything above 40% is a pass. "First" is just a paltry 70% of higher. So you can cruise through higher education and graduate, even if your scores were below 50% average.
I don't know what the solution is (US-centric). Push the education and values as widely as possible relentlesly, hoping to get a positive first derivative, and maybe in 50 years things will be better?
Likewise, best schools are clearly based in major cities and metropolises. Those are not cheap, though thanks to not as silly housing market as in the US, the difference is less than half order of magnitude for rental and cost of the living; decent system of tax funded boarding houses further evens it out some.
I've seen people barely pass all along, the 90% thing is a joke. Some even just cheat.
That said, even those barely making it are generally not half bad.
This is one of those things where there's a very long causal chain. Stopping your explanation at "students do not take education seriously" grossly and negligently oversimplifies things. [1]
For example, you ignore all the perfectly serious people who have low GPAs but have bad teachers, bad schools, abusive parents, are in deep poverty, have experienced severe trauma, or are homeless. You also ignore the many, many reasons people might end up in high school not taking education seriously.
You also ignore the people who are serious and did well but still aren't getting the college educations they need. Of which there are plenty. Apparently in your view we shouldn't help them just because there are other people you deem not serious enough.
[1] Note also that this is a pretty clear example of the fundamental attribution error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
([1] According to the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry you linked there are studies that suggest the fundamental attribution error doesn't even exist in practice.)
The US has 300 million people, we are allowed to work on more than one thing at a time.
Second:
> It doesn't matter the reasons why they don't take education seriously, the fact is that they don't. It would do absolutely nothing for these students
The reasons do matter, because some are more amenable to fixing than others. They also matter because we should fix them.
> It's not until we have 95-99% high school graduation rates, with a majority of those graduating also have high GPAs, that we need to consider whether we are providing sufficient access to colleges and universities.
This is monstrous. It is an excuse for inaction, not a serious plan.
If only one student needs more education but cannot get it, then we need to consider why. That other students are unready does not lessen their need. That other students are unready does not lessen the potential benefit to society of having a more productive, better-educated person in society.
[1] So? More work suggests that it does. And whether or not it's a primary effect or the derivative of other effects, you are certainly engaging in the pattern of behavior here, which is the point you are so busily ignoring.
You're also ignoring the point: There is zero societal value in providing cheap college to a student who, for whatever reasons, has dropped out of school in the eighth grade. We need to fix high school, not college.
And as far as providing for those who are ready, do you have any statistics that show that students who would benefit from college are unable to do so? We provide tax breaks for colleges and universities, we have grants available for needy students, we have subsidized loans available for most every student. The average student loan debt in 2016 was ~$30,000. The lifetime earnings benefit of having a bachelors degree is $600,000 - $900,000. There doesn't seem to be a college access problem.
That point is different than the one you made previously, and is much narrower. Plenty of people are excited to fix high school. But you're saying we should refuse to improve college access until high school is comprehensively fixed. (And you ignore all the other problems that reduce readiness for college besides high schools.)
Sorry, why should I provide statistics that you can readily look up since you're the one claiming you already have all the answers here? It's not my job to forcibly educate you one study at a time. Especially since you demonstrate no willingness to actually understand the problem.
Instead, person A can waft through making A's and B's while person 2 has to work their butts off, when a C should really be acceptable.
After you finished high school you can go there. (I'm not sure, but there might be some exception where you need to pass an exam)
Depending on the course, 2/3 of the students will be gone after two semesters.
On a side note, ETHZ (and other Universities in Switzerland) charge some $500-1000 per semester, and taking on student debt is rare. This way, by dropping out, students mostly only lose the invested time and don't face potential bankrupcy.
Companies already avoid asking about marital status or children etc, this could easily be added to that list.
In other words, there is a signaling and counter-signaling mechanism here. An investment banker saying they went to school in Philly is expecting you to understand they went to Wharton, and the only acceptable clarifying question is something like "oh, undergrad or for your MBA?"
Asking me not to say I went to an Ivy on my resume is fine -- I can disclose it in 50 other ways that will be obvious to the people who care and much harder to censor.
Instead my practice is to literally not look at people's resumes. This isn't perfect -- some co-workers will choose to ask about a project listed on the resume they are interested in, and I don't think that's a horrible idea usually. I simply don't like the assumptions I start to generate when I read people's resumes.
Anyway, school names tend to be worth vastly less in an interview than getting to that point. Face to face Ivy grads are better than average when selected randomly, but because of the selection effect people at elite institutions often get a negative bias to Ivy grads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
PS: You see similar things when look at people from say MIT by SAT score you would find the lower scores tend to be better indicators than high ones. Which is the same issue, people with low scores need other factors to get into the door.
Tribal community colleges tend to be dual role institutions.
1) I am not going to discuss "sovereignty" as applied to the tribe and just say schools like getting state certification because it makes everything (including grants) easier
Reforming the primary and secondary education systems in this country would make a great difference. But that is easier said than done.
At a local community college I worked at previously, the most popular math course was college algebra. Many kids right out of high school were in this course with very weak math skills. Now this is only one subject, but I think education needs to be addressed earlier.
And just to add, local community colleges are a fairly cheap avenue for just about anyone to take college course (and remedial high school courses like algebra). It shouldn't be the job of a four year college to devote extensive resources to re-teaching material that should have been learned in high school. Let's focus on making education better before college so more people are ready and qualified to enroll after high school.
Most states have a variety of institutions that cater to students of different fields and levels. What is the advantage of them all accepting everyone?
This and the "healthcare should be cheap for everyone" positions are so intellectually lazy. "Education" and "healthcare" aren't some intangible pie-in-the-sky assets that are being magically bestowed upon certain individuals. They are services provided by institutions that must pay for high tech facilities and competitive wages in order to retain the best staff, accreditations, and reputation. Those costs have to be paid by someone. A half-baked solution that is subsidized or mandated only reduces competition and drives prices higher.
But, education for all is "expensive," even though it would cost fraction per year for what we spent in Iraq per year.
Switzerland has about the same physical area and population as the state of Virginia, only it's about 50% richer by raw GDP. Not exactly a good analog for the entire US.
How does that affect government spending/GDP?
> a GDP per capita 50% higher than the US
Purchasing power is similar. This means the higher GDP per capita is compensated by higher spending on government employees, social welfare (A person without a job or children gets around 2800CHF/months) and so on.
> a physical size of about 0.5% of the US.
How does that affect government spending/GDP? The only thing I see here is potentialy lower cost for infrastructure. But then the alps that take up 60% of the land area and building tunnels is expensive.
Contrast that with a federal program and all of a sudden you have dozens of offices across the entire country. You have to add another layer of management to oversee those offices and ensure they are adhering to the same standards. Rolling out even a minor change requires re-training hundreds if not more staff. You've taken what was a relatively lean operation and turned it into a bureaucracy of the largest scale. And now it's a target for fraud because they're handing out free money and inevitably poorly investigate abuses at a snail's pace.
You can't predict the general governemnt spending based on the size, population and PPP/capita.
The fact remains, Switzerland has an extended welfare state, cheap education and still lower general government spending than the US.
But well, maybe it is also because the Swiss people have greater power over the government than any other country.
seems like cheapening the credentialing might be a better way to attack this problem
This is a great study if you want to learn more:
http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_financially_sustai...
Which, in relative terms, is not that hard: simply re-purpose state prisons.
If you filter out a lot of students early on, you don't need to build new ones.
People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce. Guess which of those I believe drives college admissions right now.
Of course many careers will benefit from a college education, but here in the US we have long since surpassed that number of people attending college.
Because education is important, and our society is helped by everyone having access to improve their lives. I don't want to get into an automation discussion, but I personally believe that it will be even more important in the next few decades.
> People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce
I completely agree! But I think that is a separate problem. I'd love to go to school for things completely unrelated to my career. I don't think college should necessarily be easy, but getting into it should be. I personally believe that encouraging people to further educate themselves, especially "non-intellectuals"* , is a great way for everyone to benefit.
IME, most people who skip college aren't skipping it because they are dumb, but because they don't have the resources to attend easily. In my own experience: High-school wasn't reflective of my current educational desires. I want to attend more college classes, but don't have the resources to do so. I live a pretty simple lifestyle, and if college isn't easily accessible to me, I can't see how it's accessible to people with kids, two jobs, etc
* : I don't know how else to phrase that without sounding condescending. If someone has a better wording, let me know.
If the problem is that there are many qualified students who can't get into college because there isn't enough supply, then the answer is to build new 4-year universities or reduce demand. Demand can be reduced by offering more vocational training opportunities or 2-year degree programs.
If the problem is that college is too expensive, that gets back to state funding of public universities as well as tuition inflation.
I think I can't really explain that system well, so here is a short pdf that explains the options you have in the Swiss education system:
http://www.edudoc.ch/static/web/bildungssystem/grafik_bildun...