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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

This is a great and generous initiative. But there is a potential downside. People, being human, tend to not value what they get for free.

Just some examples I see:

1. people don't turn off the lights when they leave a hotel room. I ask why, they say "who cares".

2. people abuse rental cars, because "it's just a rental".

3. students abuse free textbooks.

4. heck, the whole free public school system.

5. nobody values a "participation" award.

And so it goes. Students should have some sweat equity in their education.

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There will always be bad people and outliers but most people are not behaving like that. There's many countries where "free" education and healthcare (In the sense that most of the cost is abstracted away in taxes) work.

It's definitely also cultural as you can see in many Asian countries where public infrastructure (parks, public workout machines, public toilets) are treated well and are in good shape compared to other places (My point of reference being Berlin).

Asian countries probably likely have a high level of enforcement against people who try to destroy public property.

For another data point, look at how clean and well-kept public "free" housing is compared with privately owned housing.

Or how those experiments with free bicycles were a miserable failure.

Do the N years of medical school classes count as sweat equity?

One way to have skin in the game is to pay a considerable sum of money to join medical school. This reminds me of the Commitment and Consistency chapter in Cialdini's book Influence. In part it says we stick with things more after we exert effort and especially so after public effort. With free tuition we take away some of the skin in the game, but students will still have to expend considerable effort to achieve high enough grades. That probably fosters commitment (and might explain why people with scholarships still tend to value school). In any case, we already have doctors whose parents paid for school, so even when free schooling does reduce commitment (and it probably will sometimes), at least this evens the playing field.

How is this very different than applying for and accepting a scholarship? Wouldn't this have approximately the same downsides as people that get full ride scholarships to University?

I trust the medical school admission process to select good students for their program. I'm sure with free tuition they'll have more than enough promising candidates.

I can be one of those of people, but I can also tell you there’s a bevy of other people in my life who never fail to annoy the crap out of me calling me out for leaving the lights on, using too many napkins, etc. Don’t lose hope, for every person that like me, there’s many more who are not

people pay insane amounts of money and yet don't respect their degree to the extent you'd expect. just see how many people take up a course just for the sake of having a degree.

Rental cars and hotel rooms in your example are not necessarily free.

They aren't, but the hotel doesn't charge you extra for leaving the lights on, so people don't care.

Right. The marginal cost to the customer for leaving the lights on is literally zero, so they have zero care about it.

This is why modern hotels have you put your room key in a slot that enables the lights to go on. When you leave the room, you take your room key, and the lights go out.

Evidently, people leaving the lights on is expensive enough to justify these key light switches.

> Students should have some sweat equity in their education.

I don’t think you mean “sweat” here.

Because they do have sweat equity in their education. They have years of hard work behind them and ahead of them.

If they fail out of this school they can reapply and pay $300k at another school.

The freshman classes could be swamped by people who aren't serious about getting a med degree. And why should they be serious? It doesn't cost them anything. Heck, they could have a good time for a semester and never attend class. Caltech was a pretty fun place to be.

If people are halfway through, a motivating thing to keep them going is the money they've already invested in it.

I bet you'll see a significantly higher dropout rate with free tuition. Like we see in public high school.

I’m French and here overwhelmingly the best engineering schools are free with heavily subsidised housing. Admission to those schools is very competitive and students once admitted work hard at it and definitely value being there.

Private engineering schools tend to be seen as schools for those who couldn’t get in public schools but have parents with enough money to pay the fees.

So I disagree with you, keep in mind that there’s a significant barrier of admission to get accepted.

I'd be curious to know the dropout rates compared with paid tuition university.

So in France, it's complicated because we have a very selective system and different system for certain majors like engineering. For engineering, you need to do a 2 years preparatory class (heavily focused on mathematics and physics) and after that you can sit in a ranked examination for the engineering schools of your choosing. Only the x highest ranked students can get admitted to the school. Those examinations tend to be hard and scored such that it's impossible to score 100%. For the highest ranking engineering schools (polytechnique, ENS, mines, sup telecom), only 5% of students trying to pass the exam get admitted. It's significantly harder to get admitted to public engineering schools with this exam compared to private ones.

From the stats I could find, there's a drop out rate of around 20% between the first year and second year. Then 85% success rate in getting in an engineering school.

Once they are in an engineering school, the drop out rate is very low (both for private and public schools).

There are some engineering school that include the preparatory classes (we call that integrated prepa, an example is the National Institute of Applied Sciences INSA my alma mater) during the first 2 years, in that case the drop out rate is around 20% during the first 2 years and then less than 1% after that.

For both type of preparatory classes (integrated or not), students who drop out change major to something else and get to transfer credits to their new major.

For medicines, it's different. Until 2020 everyone could do the first year of medicine but only 20% would go on to the second year. Students were allowed to redo it once and then had to change major. There are no private medicine cursus in France. This has now changed and I'm not familiar with the new system.

With majors like liberal arts, etc... University is free and the drop out rate seems to be almost 60%. So yes, for majors with easy admission and free tuition (very little skin in the game) drop out rates are high.

But for highly selective programs where admission is difficult, there's very little drop out once students actually get in.

Unlike those in public high school, students who aren't serious about medical school won't have earned the entrance grades. So at least in first year, most students will have a serious attitude. Are you suggesting that someone will bust their ass for four years, only to start slacking once in medical school? Or that medical school entrance grades don't require serious study?

I can see what you mean about the halfway point. Maybe undergrad came easily, and at the halfway point, the student realizes that medical school simply isn't a good fit, or it's more work than they thought it would be. So they drop out. This is probably a good thing, to prevent people becoming doctors who don't have the chops or the attitude for it. Unfortunately, the school does lose some money on a candidate they ought to have filtered out in the interview.

Happily it's an empirical question, and we can circle back in a few years to see if the drop out rate increased or not. Maybe the drop out rate increases at first, and then the entrance interview becomes more stringent.

> The freshman classes could be swamped by people who aren't serious about getting a med degree. And why should they be serious?

This is not what medical school is like from the people I know.

Nobody has a bigger stick up their butts about how important their work is than medical students. Computer programmers (despite what reading comments here on HN would make you think) are at best a distant, distant second.

> This is not what medical school is like from the people I know.

And those are people who are paying tuition.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Med school students aren’t competitive type A driven psychos because they’re writing tuition checks.

Your data point about students paying tuition tells us nothing about what students on a free ride would do.

As opposed to your loads of data and experiential knowledge of the world of medical school students?

Do you think a tuition free Caltech would have been a bad idea?

Yes. I worked a side job to pay my way. You bet I wanted to get the value out of what I was working and paying for.

Another effect we see these days is the government education loans encourage people to sign up for expensive and useless degrees, and then they are apparently shocked that they have to pay back those loans. Hence the push for loan "forgiveness".

Without these loans, I bet there would be far less demand for these degrees with no market value.

You think Caltech would get worse students if it didn’t charge tuition? I assure you it’s well out of side job territory now.

Worse? No. But people who are more willing to drop out? Sure.

True, it was possible (barely) at the time to work part time during the school year and full time during the summer to pay the bills. Borrowing money still (at least used to) means you had to pay it back.

Universities today give out free rides to various groups of students for various reasons. I'd expect their dropout rate to be considerably higher.

BTW, I was offered a free ride by ASU. I couldn't escape the feeling that because it was offered for free, it wasn't worth as much. It's just human nature at work. I am sadly amused by all the people that deny these effects.

Why?

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