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Comment by gmu3 | Hacker News Reader

It's not the government's mandate nor responsibility to provide higher education in the United States. It infuriates me when citizens are so conceited they think the government should provide everything for them as if they have no agency themselves.

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It infuriates me when citizens are so conceited that having the money to afford a higher education is equivalent to the merit of pursuing one. A government footing the bill for higher education isn't and wouldn't be the same as simply giving it to someone on a silver platter. You still have to earn that degree based on work and merit and it certainly isn't the same thing as a handout. The idea that money is always related to agency is idiotic. There are plenty of people who have the agency to obtain a college degree but don't have the resources, monetary or societal support, to do so.

I think gmu3 is referring specifically to the 10th amendment; "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Pretty straight forward and to the point, right? So simply point to the article in the Constitution where the Fed is supposed to fund education, and we'll be on the same page.

Otherwise, it's completely up to each state to tax and spend how they see fit. Any state that wants can make the choice, and I think it's a great system where we can freely move to any state which taxes and spends to our individual liking. If only the Fed could ease up a little bit, rather than still running a deficit while collecting more money than they ever have before even in inflation adjusted dollars [1]...

Aside from the technical considerations of the Constitution, if you take a quick look at the New York Fed published slide deck [2] on trends in college loans, you can learn a lot about how much the Fed is already subsidizing the college industry and "footing the bill" indeed since a large percentage of these loans will never be repaid. They can't ever be repaid, because too many recipients of these loans don't actually gain anywhere near the marketable skills necessary to cover the cost of tuition.

[1] - http://www.cnsnews.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/lightb...

[2] - http://www.newyorkfed.org/newsevents/mediaadvisory/2013/Lee0...

>Pretty straight forward and to the point, right? So simply point to the article in the Constitution where the Fed is supposed to fund education, and we'll be on the same page.

I don't know about "supposed" to, but the federal government is certainly "able to" fund education.

There is the General Welfare Clause that affords powers to tax and approriate revenue:

to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;

And of course, the Necessary and Proper clause:

The Congress shall have Power ... To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Ultimately, however, the Constitution is interpreted by the Supreme Court, not lay-persons, so you really can't just say that it's "straight forward and to the point" without addressing any case law on the subject.

The problem is the mechanism of the government footing the bill that the US has chosen incentivizes the disgustingly high tuition rates: offering an essentially unlimited amount of debt to all but the absolute most unqualified borrowers (the standard is "no adverse credit history," and given that the vast majority of borrowers have no credit, basically no one gets denied), who then spend the money at a third party who takes on none of the risk that the students won't be able to pay back the debt. The third party acts rationally, and drastically increases its price, then justifies the price by spending it on extravagant buildings, massive administrations, and high salaries for those administrators (my alma mater had a Dean, a Vice Dean, a Chancellor, a Vice Chancellor, a Provost, a Vice Provost, and a President, not to mention the Deans and Vice Deans of specific branches like admissions and financial aid, and to this day am unclear on the difference in all their responsibilities, since they seemed to be deployed at random in responses and school-wide emails), so that they can point to how expensive it is to operate a university.

I'd be open to free education for all if the schools would pare back on administration and extravagance (since there's a strong argument that taxpayer dollars can be well-spent educating a workforce, but not a strong argument that taxpayers should be funding educations at the equivalent of an all-inclusive resort). I'd be even more open to taking the federal financial aid budget and distribute it to schools with a mandate that it be distributed in the form of grants and financial aid, so that in order to maintain their quality of life, they'll be forced to work to actually generated positive outcomes for all of their students, rather than following and promoting the successes and ignoring the rest.

People have agency. They just don't have money.

What about primary education? Are you against that too? Do you think every taxpayer should foot the bill even if they don't and never will have children?

These are serious questions.

It's funny, because in most other first world countries, it is the responsibility of the government to provide higher education to its citizens. Perhaps you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or "pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps", but not all of us are so lucky to have thousands of dollars to put toward education.

On the other hand there is an enormous concentration of globally preeminent higher education institutions (Stanford, MIT, Harvard and the other 7 Ivy League schools, UChicago, Duke etc) in the one first world country where the national-level government doesn't consider higher education among its responsibilities.

(*insert caveat that it's hard to really compare national governments when a single US state can have a larger population to manage than an entire European country)

You argue that the result is as it is because it's a better result, which is a flawed argument.

If we vote to provide higher education, then it is.

I concur

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