Quality of education alone is hard enough to control for. What’s stopping the for-profit elite schools from just raising the bar until public schools simply can’t keep up?
If MIT and Stanford raise the bar on education, isn't that a good thing? Don't we want them to be giving the very best education that they possibly can?
This author wants to talk about broad access to education instead. They note correctly that there are really not that many people who are affected by these policy squabbles and far more who benefit from getting access to higher education of any non-elite quality.
The students who accumulate crippling debt usually attended second and third tier private colleges. Those are generally a terrible value.
In San Francisco, where I live, some in the community are challenging smart kids tracking into exclusive experiences in public K-12 schools.
Among people who are eligible for tracking, tracking seems really popular. But the plurality seems really unhappy with it. So there will always be XYZ, a word I cannot use, in communities to de facto track in public schools, or sometimes there will be legacy admissions, or whatever.
Maybe you don't believe these stylized facts. Like you already sound like the same people in this community who want to end tracking: us vs. them. I know you probably don't actually want that, but you're the perfect example of a tipping point, expressing an eensy weensy amount of resentment for "elite school buddies," that somehow winds up in "end gifted programs." Surely you see that.
Part of what makes a school "elite" is admissions selectivity, research output, and academic reputation. Making undergraduate tuition free for public colleges will still make private target schools still elite and put additional admissions constraints on top public colleges (UMich, UVA, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UT Austin, and the likes), and ironically make them more "elite".
Also the problem isn't just the affordability of schools - it's affordability of schools for certain classes and enrollment limits for desirable universities.
Rich students will be able to pay for elite universities out of pocket. Poor students will be able to afford through financial aid/scholarships at elite universities. I don't have the numbers with me top of my head but most elite universities often have financial policies that cap loans at reasonable amount and give grants to cover the rest. It's the middle class that gets squeezed because they don't make enough money/get enough assistance.
I guess this in the USA this is an insider/outsider problem where "elite" school insiders prefer other "elite" insiders over other, potentially equally capable candidates.
The difference is that most European countries didn't have private universities.
And if you go to Western US states, you'll see similar recruiting elitism from top public schools like UCB, UCLA, and UT Austin.
First off, make it tax payer funded is what they mean. And no thank you.
Second, we already pay for 13 years of school, why would I believe 4 more years would help? Who is out there championing public school is the excellent model of education?
13th grade is not a solution to anything.
It’s clear to me we are facing a complexity crisis and almost no one sees it.
People that don’t belong in college aren’t going to be better off when everything is too complex for them as is, and getting worse.
A tech at Jiffy Lube needs to know so much more than 20 years ago, but the kid isn’t any smarter at all.
The guy pouring concrete needs to know a lot more, paying for his degree won’t help, but it will take 4 years of experience away.
IDGAF about “elite schools” if you someone took those away, the rich would self-sort another using another method.
The issue here is we aren’t ready to say “we’ve made most of the world too complex for most people in it”. And so have no remedy for that.
That comes with its own suite of issues, of course.
Huh? How so? If the only change is that you no longer need to pay for college, but otherwise admission standards and education quality remain the same, then why would the value of a diploma change? Unless the diploma was implicitly a signal for wealth, of course...
If a job has a high wage because they require a specific college degree, then making the degree easier to get since you don't have to pay for it, then there will be more people with that degree, so the supply of workers is higher, making them easier to replace, so the wages of those workers goes down.
"Today, children of upper middle class families have a path to getting good paying jobs that the poor are largely shut out from. We don't wish for that change by making public universities free, thereby preventing competition for these desirable jobs by the children of the poor."
You're advocating we toss escapees from the crab bucket back into the bucket because it's not fair to the rest of the crabs.
You are confusing "easier to afford the degree" with "easier to learn and obtain the degree." The former does not imply the latter in any way, shape, or form.
A lot of presidents have come from this public school. It shows that just making it public does not really fix the problem of lack of social ascension. With the fierce competition children that get access to private tutors and financial support have the edge.
The article argues that public colleges being free "[...] will alleviate the student debt crisis and enable low-income students, particularly those of color, to go to college."
Your point about elite schools still existing can (and will) be true at the same time in this hypothetical universe where US public college tuition is free.