What percentage of the population is able to take advantage of the free college? What are the job prospects like for those who don't go to college?
But way more than this are "able to", as you put it. In order to be eligble, one needs passing grades in a high percentage of high school subjects, including some mandatory ones. But failing that, one can always study for that credit later in life.
Just for contrast, that's much lower than the US, where 44% of the population has completed an undergraduate degree equivalent.
And as pointed out by others in this thread, Sweden (like other European countries) does not have a great track record when it comes to ensuring equality for people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Yes, in theory, these programs might be available to everyone, but when stratification occurs in the education system from a very young age, it makes for much larger differences down the line.
> What percentage of the population is able to take advantage of the free college?
About 30%. Note that this is roughly the same as the percentage of Americans with a college degree.
So it's not some crazy cut-throat system and is not a lottery. Basically, people who know they want to go to college, plan ahead, and apply themselves, can mostly do so. People who want the opportunity sometimes don't get it, but that's true everywhere.
And there are a ton of stories of people moving from the non-university track into the university track even later in life. So there's a lot of mobility if you apply yourself.
> What are the job prospects like for those who don't go to college?
See the example OECD dataset here for "upper secondary; non-tertiary": https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rates-by-education-... tl;dr: quite good. Better than or comparable to the US.
But, if I go to college and dick around and fail out, why should taxpayers have to pay my tuition?
If I try breeding chickens and some of them stop laying eggs, should I abandon the whole endeavor and start buying my chickens from the local supermarket because some chicken are dicking around?
All national efforts are going to have some waste, it's inevitable and I think we can more than comfortably afford it. Our job should not be to scrutinize every detail in order to minimize waste (of course we should be doing that as well) but rather to make sure that every wheat seed and every chicken have all they need in order to fully develop themselves to the best of their abilities.
There is a reason we expend so much energy and care in looking after wheat and chickens. It's so we can eat them.
An animal on a farm might be treated well (at the discretion of the farmer) (until they are slaughtered), but they aren't free. An animal in the wild has freedom, but not security.
America heavily favors the latter, or at least it used to, times may be a'changing.
An animal that gives up its freedom for security deserves neither.
I agree that the original metaphor was inappropriate because it compares people to domesticated animals and crops that have no free will and would not exist without the farm, not to mention the personal freedom implications of equating citizens to domesticated animals.
There would be a huge incentive for all of these people to declare bankruptcy, discharge the debt, and then wait around the ~7 years for the bankruptcy to disappear from their credit report. As long as they don't want to buy a house during that period it wouldn't even be much of an inconvenience.
If what you say is true, why don't people graduate college, live large on credit cards for a few years, and then just declare bankruptcy? There's zero consequence to it right?
Edit: This would also put further pressure on banks to make sure the loans are not so burdensome that this becomes an attractive option. Theoretically, anyone could do this with any loan (although taking out a loan with the intention of declaring bankruptcy is fraud and would go badly), but most people don't, because it's easier to just repay the loan than deal with 7 years of hassles b/c of bankruptcy.
(Preemptively: for almost that entire time, my family was living basically paycheck-to-paycheck, and our largest expenses were rent and food).
People do leave college and rack up enormous credit card debt. The reason everyone doesn't BK is that there's a social stigma to it, and also, in general, the average American consumer does not have a good idea how the credit system works. Read Patrick McKenzie about this sometime. If more people understood how generous our creditor/debitor laws were to consumers, or how clownshoes disorganized consumer finance was (why would they give a shit? they're judged almost entirely on growth), people would take much more ruthless advantage of it.
But there's also a difference between accumulating $50,000 of revolving credit debt over a span of 5-10 years and six figures based on a decision you make when you are eighteen years old.
If you just don't have a credit history, then you're an unknown quantity, but most institutions will still take a risk possibly with some security. Everyone starts out with no credit so you have to start somewhere.
This is entirely different from someone who has proven themselves to be a bad risk by already refusing to repay their debts.
You can easily live a normal life through your 20's with a bankruptcy on your record. (I don't have one, but I know people who do.)
Without loans to support exorbitant tuition, prices will have to go down to what people are actually able to afford to pay.
Even on a topic like consumer finance where I consider myself fairly knowledgable.
And there isn't zero consequence to defaulting. They'll still take the couple grand you have in your checking account. And having crappy credit is somewhat inconvenient (for the reasons you mention).
It's about cost vs reward. If you've only got $5k in credit card debt then the reward isn't worth the cost. But if you've got $100k in student loan debt those costs start to look pretty small.
Without an unlimited supply of money, universities will not be able to charge outrageous amounts for tuition and will have to be more in line with what people are actually able to pay. That's better all around.
I mean, if any 18 year old could fill out a form and get a government-guaranteed six figure loan to buy a car. A loan that they were prohibited from ever defaulting on...then Toyota Corollas would probably cost $150k too...
You'd have a lot fewer people going to college. And the people missing out would be poorer and browner.
Now, maybe that would be OK. But a lot of people wouldn't see it that way.
The people who lose out the most in our current system seem to be those in the middle - not poor enough to qualify for need-based aid, but not rich enough to be able to afford it. Those are the ones who end up with the loans. If tuition hadn't been significantly outpacing inflation for the last few decades, they and their families would probably be able to swing the bill.
Limiting free college to 30% of the population would never work in the U.S. By 2025, more than half of high school graduates will be minorities, mostly socioeconomically disadvantaged minorities. Without getting into the "why," these groups score substantially lower on the metrics (test scores, sometimes straight-up IQ tests) that Germany uses to select the 30% of students who have access to college. To ensure that enough disadvantaged minorities would have access to free college, the U.S. would need the large majority of high school graduates to go to free college. That would make the program much more expensive than in Germany.
Applying the German system to the U.S. unchanged would not only be politically impossible, but would be hugely regressive. It would be a massive taxpayer-funded program that would benefit primarily students that are advantaged to begin with.
For the $75-billion estimated cost of free college, we could write a $5,000 check for each and every child under the poverty line, every year. That seems a lot better use of money than ensuring that a bunch of primary middle/upper middle class kids get free college.
I'll add that you could take care of a lot of the rest of the things by having a strong support system.
Only about 30% of americans have college degrees as it is. Not as much would change.
If you take some other countries examples as well and include things like trade schools and things that would be an associates degree elsewhere, your number would be much higher. These sorts of programs are tracked seperately.
It's a shame you're being downvoted, because you're right. To put it another way: the reason Germany, France, Spain, etc. are able to provide free education is twofold:
1) They provide education to a much smaller portion of the population than the US does (~25% in Germany compared to >45% the US).
2) They're content with having a system which reinforces racial inequalities from a very young age.
The US education system, for all its faults, is actually quite good at providing opportunities for minorities in higher education, and the rates of degrees awarded bear this out. It's unpopular to point this out, but that's something that the German/French/etc. models don't do at all. Yes, the opportunities are available to people from any racial background in theory, but in practice, they mask significant racial disparities under the guise of being "colorblind".
"German university enrollment rose by 22% as tuition disappeared...—while the number of Germans who opt instead for vocational education has declined. On the other hand, the cost to taxpayers of subsidizing higher education went up 37%. [Later:] ...The shift to dependence on government funding, combined with the increase in enrollment, has also meant a 10% decline in spending per student in the last few years, the OECD reports. Today, German public schools spend about $16,895 per student, compared with $27,924 per student in the United States."
"In Germany, low-income students can apply for grants and loans totaling around €650 a month ($580) to pay for living expenses. Since almost all students live off campus, this creates an unanticipated outcome: Even in a country where universities don’t charge tuition, students are still graduating with debt....68% of German students work,... and “students from a lower socioeconomic background try to study faster.” Students are also more likely to choose practical subjects like marketing or human resources. Meanwhile medicine and law degrees, which take longer and therefore cost more, remain careers mostly for the wealthy."
"Three-quarters of German’s adult college graduates have children who also earn university degrees, Woessmann said, compared to a 25% of adults who don’t have degrees. (In all, 57% of the equivalent of high school graduates go on to college here, the OECD reports, compared to what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says is 69% of their American counterparts.)"
Then, there's "In Norway, where college is free, children of uneducated parents still don’t go", (https://hechingerreport.org/in-norway-where-college-is-free-...).