I’ll also throw in the idea (as an addition not a replacement to what you say) of national service in some form which isn’t military service (lots of ways to help the country beyond the military) and the government funding a university education to some degree in exchange for that.
However.
This episode is about the current proposals for patching up our current system. This following summary is so over generalized as to certainly be mostly wrong; so please just read it as indicative of the policy challenges:
Currently, each state runs their own higher education institutions (university, community colleges, voc tech, etc). The feds currently handle the student loans. (States and institutions also receive grants, research monies, etc. YMMV.)
In our future perfect free school system, feds would give money to the states to spend. Since the feds can't just tell states what to do, there may be some kind of carrot & stick arrangement, like how the highway funds were dispersed.
But that's no guarantee that state's will sign up or play nicely. For example, look at the spotty adoption of Medicare expansion. Some states declined FREE MONEY, which had very few strings, because of REASONS.
Which leads us back to today's Gordian knot. How do the feds design and implement a fair system which is strenuously opposed by some states and a lobby of the most powerful universities? The feds don't want to enable dysfunctional states who are screwing over their own students. The feds also want to avoid rewarding bad behavior, eg giving bad states the same deal as good states.
So right now it seems the best leverage the feds have is thru student loans. Hopefully our nation progresses to something more reasonable.
[1] I have no idea what free higher education would look like. I was pretty happy with my state's pre-Reagan funding model; not quite free, but still very generous. I do accept that students have to have some "skin in the game". Civil or military service leading to free education is great. And I also accept that just giving institutions money, no strings attached, leads to bad outcomes. So maybe a hybrid system; 50% state funded directly, 25% student funded (self or loans), and 25% vouchers (like charter schools). But I'm open to any reasonable, pragmatic system.
I've seen it in 'incentives' to develop local railway-adjacent properties. City subsidized rents, but they just advertised 'premium' apartments and the rent is the same/higher than elsewhere. The developer pockets the incentive.
Lest we imagine that some institutions to lower their rates because of Fed support, that isn't happening now and rates are already well above what it takes to run a college.
Story of graft is as old as history.
But somehow I'm optimistic. Management and governance are technologies too. (h/t Peter Drucker) We can do better. We will do better.
How do we incentive desired outcomes? Ensure feed back loops are working? Thwart conflicts of interest? Try out new ideas, run experiments? Share best practices?
I've been wandering around for 20 years, hoping to meet other people (locally) who apply Drucker, Deming, Everett Rogers, etc. paradigms to policy nuts and bolts. Something like this, but for the close combat of actual work:
https://ssir.org/issue/winter_2021
I've started to read about participatory democracy (h/t David Graeber), but have yet to find people applying those strategies at work.
Last week, my politic & policy bestie turned me onto holocracy. I'm still chewing on it, am rather skeptical tbh, so won't share any links.
Meanwhile, we don't need to fix any and everything. It's enough to make some improvements, lick our wounds, and then do it all again.
That said, lots of things are hard :). Which I don’t think you’re necessarily disagreeing with.
idealy one would think so, but the issue is we have paired our democracy with economics that demand compound annual growth, and where the money goes, so follows everything else...
Or often we have a glut into 'trendy' major that have fuzzy benefits to the society (think marketing/pr). Since it is not a specialized skill, many do have trouble finding jobs in their field.
The barista at my favorite coffee place, had a marketing/pr degree... you just don't need a college degree to make coffee. If she never finds a job in her field, or something that requires college degree, it would have been wasted money and a loss to society.
If you have to give free college, it has to be conditioned to things that do benefit the economy/society (engineering, teachers, medicine, etc). This introduced a different problem, that is 'state planing'.
Further, who's to say college is a society-profiting institution? Why them and not, say, circuses? Movie houses? Candy manufacturers? Are we so poor a nation, that we have to cut institutions to the bone and they all have to be mercenary money makers?
Educated populace makes for better voters. Which God knows we need.
I think you're missing the word "financial" there, going by the rest of your comment.