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Comment by kfrzcode | Hacker News Reader

> Just make college free.

Sure, have some funding ideas?

Raise the income tax, create a VAT, kill the mortgage-interest tax deduction, add a Financial transaction tax, tax capital gains like normal income, stop subsidizing fossil fuel extraction, add a carbon tax, and lower the threshold for the inheritance tax and raise the percentage.

Instead, can we have a negative income tax?

Land, wealth, and other rents taxes.

Making college free is a huge waste of resources.

College is largely an exercise in social credentialing and signaling. If we make college free, the people who want to get ahead in society will just go to expensive graduate programs in order to distinguish themselves. Then the discussion will shift to fully funding those programs...

Our current system is very fair. Take out a loan if you need to, but make sure your post graduation prospects justify taking a loan out. If they don't, then don't get the loan.

One of the major reasons why college is so expensive today is because the availability of loans means Universities are able to continuously hike tuition in support of ever expanding bureaucracies (not in support of the core educational mission) without fear of students not being able to pay, because the loans mean students can always secure funding! Society is basically writing them a blank check... The answer is NOT to give them even more money!

College education has become a financial black hole that will only expand if we throw more money at it.

I have some bad news for you: graduate programs are usually fully funded and some PhD students even get a stipend for attending.

PhD students getting stipends are essentially contract employees. They are doing work, either as associate instructors or research assistants, for that money.

Sure, reappropriate some of the US military budget ($717 billion).

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-approves-717b-defense-s...

Not a bad idea. There are 1.6M professors (including part time, but let's just assume they're full time). If we paid them 100K each, it would only cost $160B per year. So we can definitely afford to continue with a smaller military.

Obviously the amount of people enrolling and therefore the number of professors will have to increase. However some of that can be addressed by using more internet based lectures, etc..

Also, to backfill the loss to the military, they could require a significant portion of the degrees be in robotics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj1MCjeFxrM

We're going to really need that military when China, when we make degrees in underwater basketweaving free for everyone and China (which has a sensible approach to what education is and is not valuable) overtakes us economically and technologically.

Sure. Those invisible fighter jets that don't work were a great investment.

The US military is a publicly funded socialist entity. Interesting how that's ok for war but not for education.

The U.S. military accepts something like 20% of its walk-in recruits. [0] When you imagine education as a "socialized entity," I strongly suspect you're not picturing an institution that rejects 80% of the population (for reasons like, say, being too fat).

[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/13/uncle-sam-d...

I don't think you understand. It's a thing we all pay for. It's a publicly funded service that defends the country. It's not about who gets in, it's about how it's paid for. We all pay together for something that is not explicitly for profit that we believe to be for the good of the country. This is socialism.

But also, to your point, colleges would still reject students based on grades. This happens in countries with free college education. Standards are still maintained but it doesn't depend on how much money you have. We would get the best candidates based on merit instead of their parents income.

On the contrary, I don't think you understand how college admissions work. When you're rejected by the military, there's no second- or third-tier back-up plan. But anybody who wants to go to college can go to college and they can get it paid for, no matter how unproductive or frivolous their major.

When Stanford rejects you, you try a state school; when the state school rejects you, you go to one of the state's less prestigious satellite campuses. If they reject you (which is extremely unlikely), you go to community college.

Federal aid is available at each strata.

Ok, sounds good, let's increase that federal aid and take the money from the military budget.

Can something be socialist when a private version could never exist?

Yes. That's not what defines it.

By that definition, isn't every military a socialist entity?

That's the point, isn't it?

The US right holds the contradictory opinions that socialized government can't accomplish anything effective, and that the US military (which is fundamentally a socialized entity) is amazing and awesome and supremely capable.

Yes

Look at how other countries in the world fund these things.

Germany even made University free for foreigners.

It's not free. There is no tuition, but at least in TUM (Munich) there is a 'student union and basic ticket' free. It's €129.40 per semester [1]. There are financial aid options available. This applies to all students regardless of nationality.

TUM is a top technical university by German, European and World standards. [2]

[1] - https://www.tum.de/en/studies/fees-and-financial-aid/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_University_of_Munich...

This discussion is ridiculous from an European standpoint.

In Germany all universities (with very few exceptions) are completely free and students have just to pay their cost of living (can apply for subsidies for that too).

There were many studies which showed that ANY fee is a deterrent for students from poor families.

In my opinion the current political development around the world shows that better education is absolutely required for humanity. Education should be financed via taxes (and taxes for high incomes should be increased accordingly to finance it).

I liked the financial transaction tax proposed by Sanders. France, Belgium, and Singapore manage to have this without being known as financial wastelands were no exchanges exist.

Additionally fully nationalize the public schools, and work to remove the administrative bloat that has occurred. I know that the libertarian side here on HN is going to see this and say "more government -> less overhead? does not compute", but hear me out. Their pseudo private status has set up the incentives to de facto remove education from the core mission of universities. Chasing grant money, real estate capital, and investments might technically make them more money, but that flies in the face of what they should be doing, IMO.

Taxes

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