Many people do not belong in college and learn next to nothing, but go because they're shoo'ed along into it and the universities are in on the joke, and in on the money-making, and undergoing a drastic reduction of standards as a result.
Some data on just how bad higher ed is getting, from 2017: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...
If you are allowed to re-enroll, you have 1 strike left. Another sub-2.0 GPA and you're gone.
If the US brought such a generation-transforming policy like this to the table, the easiest part of it would be to set that minimum standard across all participating schools. Most likely already have something close to this in place now.
Free higher education works well in the European countries that offer it.
What better investment could a society make than allow someone to pursue a field they are passionate about, and letting them start life with a clean slate? I'm by no means a socialist, but I think university should mostly be free.
The only thing (student) debt does is tie someone down. To a lifestyle or employer that they actually should have no loyalty to.
Tax brackets don't need to rise, resources just need to be moved from alternative things (i.e. military spending).
It depends what you're looking at. I think it hurts local communities by exporting all the young talent and gets people plugged into the white collar, global economy.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy what I do, but I think a lot of the time in college could have been better spent learning how to build houses, make furniture, grow food, etc.
If the government is going to pay for it I would like it to be a better resource for enriching the nation, not just a tool for generating more wealth.
Then go do a degree on agro engineering ?
(If performance at an identifiable subset of schools is better, then it's more that spending resources on the other schools is questionable than it is that higher education is in a crisis)
Median salaries pool are much higher at the top yet tuition is really similar across all schools.
This is true with undergraduate programs as well. Median starting salary after graduation at University of Florida is 52k. FIU and UCF, both a few hours away with similar programs? 46k.
University of Houston? 53k. Rice University a few miles away? 64k.
I've named schools that are all pretty good...the story gets much worse with private universities that are not selective. There are always people who do fantastic regardless of which school they go to but in aggregate schools matter a lot.