It's long past time for the wealthiest country in the world to make education free.
Seems like, in terms of income/job prospects, you're better off studying to be an electrician or plumber (which is relatively cheap) than getting a BA in liberal arts or the humanities (which is relatively expensive). If this is the case, solution definitely isn't to encourage more people to do the latter.
Somewhere there's a point where it costs more than it produces, dependent on how much time the person will spend being a more-educated person before they die, and I expect also dependent on the precise education being imparted, but I'd be surprised if that line was where the free education cut-off currently is.
Define done right. General education does have positive externalities and we provide that for everyone up to the end of high school. However, college and beyond is about specializing. There are many majors that have way to many students majoring in them only to end up getting a job out of college that does not use any of the skills they learned in college. I do not see how subsidizing those students would be beneficial.
The only problem is that this practical, pragmatic approach violates some people's morals. Similarly to how the US could have a far cheaper, far more effective corrections system, but that be morally objectionable for too many people.
On a personal note, I'm not convinced that the end of high school is the correct cut-off point for free education (particularly given that the US has become a far more technological society and economy over the last century), but I don't have any evidence for that. It would seem something of a suspicious coincidence.
We should make it real cheap to get educated as a doctor or nurse though (and most other medical stuff). Sure, they have great personal returns on their education now, but that's exactly what we want to erode, by flooding the market.
It's been awhile since I worked in healthcare but I don't think primary care provider pay is high on the list of most impactful cost cutting improvements
It's not so much that they take home an inordinate share of healthcare spending, it's that the market is severely supply constrained.
I think if you add more people to a bad system you tend to make things worse. Better to fix the process rather than throw more (poorly managed) resources at it
Stretching the discussion a little, we could ask the same question about all education. Why is any of it free? But the benefits to the United States (for example) of almost everyone being able to read and write (for example) are incredible. If a large proportion of the US population had dropped out of school before being able to read and write (because of the cost), the US would be extraordinarily less wealthy. Everyone would lose out.
I don't care which party you favor. Viewing the institution as a whole, do you think that Congress could do this right? I don't.
We could eliminate that requirement by buying one or two fewer aircraft carriers or stealth bombers. Seems like a fair trade to me.
13 billion is 325,000 degrees at 40k each or 260,000 at 50k each.
21 B-2 stealth bombers from Northrop Grumman in the 1980s and 1990s at a price of more than $2 billion each. 2 billion in 1990 is equal to 9.8 billion dollars today. That's 4-5 million 4-year degrees for what those 21 aircraft cost!!!
Also if you educate 100 people, the majority of them will provide benefit to the economy via any number of ways. The government already throws tons of money at educational institutions, but as research grants for military/defense research, why not educate the populace? For that matter, why not create government educational institutions that cut out all of the fluff and in upon completion of a program you enter into an income share agreement for 5-10 years at 10-5%.
The primary benefit of a large conventional military is to deter such an event from even happening. That said, the air support provided from carriers definitely helped a great deal to curb and reverse the spread of ISIS.
> Also if you educate 100 people, the majority of them will provide benefit to the economy via any number of ways.
If this were true, then it would be economically advantageous for those 100 people to borrow the money themselves (perhaps with the help of a government subsidy). And they do.
I'd believe that, a decade or two ago. The Global Hawk drone has a declassified record of 33.1 hours of flight time at 60,000 feet though for surveillance and doesn't have pilot fatigue as swapping out a pilot is as simple as "hey Greg,your shift is about over, stand up whenever you're ready and I'll take over watching the monitors".
UCAVs (unnamed combat aerial vehicles) are possessed by more than 20 confirmed countries. The United States as 2 publcily known variants, the MQ-1 since 1995 and the MQ-9 since 2001. The MQ-9 costs about 16 million dollars, can carry 750lbs of payload to 50,000 feet and fly for 30 hours or carry considerably more (like Hellifre, JDAM, laser guided bombs etc) for much shorter periods. These can take off from any sufficiently long flat surface, can be transported anywhere in the world in C-17s and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if they've devised a way to launch them out of C-17s.
As ISIS doesn't have fighter jets, there's no need to have fighter jets ready to take off to engage them. Aerial combat as a whole is effectively a thing of yesteryear.
Having a giant floating city in the ocean six-thousand persons simply isn't necessary anymore. Yes, we need certain types of ships for guarding ports and trade routes by aircraft carriers are gross overkill and largely the money-giving beast of lobbyists, politicians and defense contractors.
>If this were true, then it would be economically advantageous for those 100 people to borrow the money themselves
Except for the part where college tuition is outrageous, many many people do not qualify for government subsidized loans and interest rates on private loans can be outrageous and you could easily be servicing the loans for DECADES unless you want to live in a van with 3 other people.
The same could be said about traditional universities, especially now that, as you point out, they're so expensive that the cost is ruinous on a per-capita basis. I see no reason that this would change if the cost was borne by the federal government any more than the cost of the Navy would change.
I think part of the solution if you truly want cheaper education is remove all but core classes from the required curriculum so students aren't laying for bs classes majority of them retain none of. Then allow any student to sit in on any class they have personal interest in and allow generic automatic testing so the student can get a general feel for if they learned well enough (though my opinions on testing are low overall, I know many students still like the benchmark).
Free college would just lower acceptance rates at good state schools and allow more people to complete degrees in community colleges. If anything it will make state school degrees even more valuable; roughly the same number of people will graduate from the same school but the cohort will be academically stronger.
IDK what you were imagining exactly with that last bit, but at my old uni you could test out of basically any class by paying $60 and taking essentially the final in the testing center; if you got >70% iirc you got credit for the course and could advance to the next but no a grade.
If anything it will increase value? Don't buy it. What's your reasoning? Look at the value of college today on avg compared to that of 30 years ago and adjust inflation. People pay much more for what they get now than they did then, because of the saturation.
With the last bit - if you major in chemistry you don't have to take art or anything not chemistry. If you're art you take art. It's a sham that you're required to take all those other classes. They do very little for the vast majority, and if you want the knowledge you can take the classes as you'd like.
School shouldn't be job training only. I majored in a stem field and my favorite classes where the ones where I dove into classical literature, believe it or not. Sure, the degree got me my job, but it also exposed me to the liberal arts in a way that would have been impossible if I tried to study it on my own, because it actively challenged me to step into another field for a minute and reach out to unfamiliar sources to build understanding. There's value in being a well rounded, educated citizen, in my book. The academies of ancient Greece weren't training better farmers or builders, they were training better thinkers and therefore better citizens. That's what modern colleges try to do when they make you take liberal arts classes for an engineering degree. And a chemist who's taken time to learn to read, study, and write well is going to be a better professional chemist than someone who's just done grunt work in the lab and slogged through the chem series, because not only has that better scientist also done that, they've polished their intangibles through liberal arts classes.
Why not remove the fat then? If you cut classes, this won't make institutional parasites disappear, as they'll invent other things to justify their existence. I feel the ballooning overhead surrounding the core mission (here: education and scientific research) needs to be addressed directly.
Ballooning enrollment leads to more money spent on facilities and administration, which means even less money goes directly toward educating students.
It is a mess.
1970: $2.2b
1980: $3.2b
1990: $4.0b
2000: $4.6b
2010: $3.5b
2015: $3.2b