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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.

That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?

>And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.

Sounds like the solution is to raise teacher pay, which would also have the added benefit of retaining teachers after they graduate. Giving teachers cheap training but paying them poorly seems worse than the status quo because you end up shoveling money into training teachers that'd end up dropping out anyways.

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> That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?

We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's just something we choose to fund collectively, because that's the kind of society we want to be.

But also, progressive taxation means that the rich fund it more than the poor. So the general idea is that if law school and medical school are expensive to provide but result in vastly higher salaries, then it gets paid for in the end out of those lawyers' and doctors' taxes. Not the taxes from average Americans.

Progressive taxation isn’t even necessary. If someone makes $10,000 and is taxed 10%, they give up $1,000. And if someone makes $10,000,000 then they give up $1,000,000.

> Progressive taxation isn’t even necessary

It isn’t necessary, no, and in fact a flat super simple tax code would probably result in more tax revenue. However, since politicians like the power of the tax code, and because the wealthy like a complex tax code for all the loopholes, and since ordinary people like the idea of those wealthier than them paying more tax as a percentage of their income, then we’re never going to get a simple tax code.

But it’s not the same as K-12. I can’t send my kids to an expensive private boarding school and expect taxes to pay for it.

And absolutely the same logic can and should apply for universities - there can be private exclusive institutions, but the majority should be affordable and mostly paid for by taxes.

This already is the case. 75% of student debt is private universities and colleges.

If you get into Stanford but can't afford it, a loan seems like a good idea, but in reality the loan eligibility should consider the degree and future earning potential (along the same lines of how banks qualify other types of loans).

If we simply cancel student debt or remove private colleges' ability to charge a market rate the result will be no more private colleges (similar to other countries with fully publicly funded education). In these countries you typically have a national exam that determines where you go, or you have to lottery in to a school if it isn't in your district.

>We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's just something we choose to fund collectively, because that's the kind of society we want to be.

But in K-12 education, the taxpayer/state has strong control over what's taught. In the last few years there's some latitude by the students, but nothing close the panoply of programs offered by universities. If education is state funded, but only for programs with proven ROI (eg. STEM), I'd be fine with that.

When the state pays, what matters is the ROI to the state. There is a need for teachers, social workers, and people familiar with various cultures, but the market will never pay them well.

Public funding models often have incentives for delivering the degrees the state wants. For example, there could be field-specific quotas for degrees. The university gets paid for each degree up to the quota, but not for exceeding the quota. That can have interesting effects in fields that are popular but in low demand. For example, the acceptance rate to psychology can be as low as 2-3%.

A country's which population is educated, usually bodes well, unless it's an authoritative govt one, in which case dumbing down the population is the way (from the govt POV, at least)

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