Could Free College work in America?

[PolarGuy]

People are already taking 5-6 years to finish college (I did it in 3!). If food was free people would eat more. Free college = still more people hanging around college forever.

 

[signit]

Interesting question. I’ve always wondered that, ever since years ago I learned in that in France the government pays for college.

I’d tend to be in favor of it, just based on basic fairness. A person from a working-class background should have the same educational opportunities as someone else.

The system isn’t perfect as it is, where the highly qualified student has to quit college to help her family out and the C or D student from an upscale family gets to go to “prep school” for a year after college to bring his grades up so he can attend the college of his choice. I knew both of these individuals; they’re real.

On the flip side, education is something to be earned, not an entitlement. Sometimes, the journey to getting a university degree is often more critical than a degree itself, working those part-time jobs to help pay for tuition and books might not seem glamorous at first, but it might help build character (i.e hard work and determination), it develops a work history needed for future careers and employment, possible references and connections for the future.

As I see it, if a person was able to get into college, and the government is paying for it, that person has “earned” it just as much as the person whose family is paying it all.

No they don’t. I attended a university with what was considered a fairly poor athletic department. Even so, I got to suffer through a year of having a roommate who was there on a full scholarship so she could run on the track team. Never mind that she was functionally illiterate. Never mind that she had failed so many classes in high school that had she attended high school in the state where my university was located, she would not have been allowed to graduate at all. Never mind even that she was disqualified from actual competition because she could not manage to get above a 12 on the ACT, despite the university paying for her to take it five times. Never mind that I was working my butt off at two different jobs to pay for my education while she got to stay there for free. I would have been fine minding my own business. What I couldn’t ignore was her insistence that she had to have her various boyfriends over at all hours of the night, sleeping in the bunk over my head, her desire to stay up listening to loud music at all hours of the night, (why not? she didn’t have to work) and the fact that she kept trading/selling my belongings to pay for who-knows-what. Despite the fact that this person was unable to pass more than one remedial class a semester, she was allowed to stay for FOUR semesters before they finally put her out.

Don’t get me started on athletes.

I also don’t mind (in my case) male athletes getting scholarships for sports, but I didn’t like them disrupting the experience for others (not just loud partying but harassment, bullying, etc.) and I have never forgotten the experience.

 

[Allegra]

People are already taking 5-6 years to finish college (I did it in 3!). If food was free people would eat more. Free college = still more people hanging around college forever.

So what? Have a limit of credit hours that a students can get for free. They can take as long as they like. Problem solved.

 

[shockerfan]

Given that not all occupations require a college education, it is not certain that this could ever be made equitable. For given that those who might not require same might yet be called to sustain the high cost through taxes so that their peers might arrive at carriers far more lucrative than they themselves may have achieved, it would appear highly unfair from a given perspective…

Perhaps one means of solving such a dilemma is to merely tax those whose professions might best benefit from the education…for in taxing doctors so as to cover the costs of medical school for new graduates some level of equity might be attained…except, naturally, for those who have both already paid their way and yet must now pay a tax to assist those coming up from behind…

Tax doctors to cover cost of med school? Hmm…lets think about this:

1. In order to get into med school, one must first sacrifice and get very good grades in college. College isn’t free, and many students entering med school have debt.
2. In order to get into college one merely needs to apply to several schools of their choice, write a few essays, and pay some fees. If a person is smart about it, they might apply to one or two stretch schools, two or three schools they have a good chance at, and maybe one or two “fall backs”. Colleges accept any where from 1000 students to 15,000 students for each class (on average, depending on size of school). For med school, they only average 100 - 200 students per class, give or take. So in order to have a chance at med school, one must apply to many schools, and fly to them for interviews. This costs money…more debt!
3. When one is in med school, you’re talking $30K per year on the low side (like Baylor in Houston) to the high side of $70-80K per year on the high side)…more debt
4. In order to get into a particular residency…one has to apply to multiple hospitals…more interviews, more plane tickets, more money, and more debt (I know someone who spent $25K on this process)
5. Residents are doctors, but don’t make much
6. Finally, when done with residency, doctors start making money…like when they are 30!
7. Then, they have to pay outrageous medical malpractice insurance rates

With all that, you want to tax them??? Why make the profession, especially after Obamacare, any less appealing?

People need doctors…tax the people who need them!

(sorry for the diatribe…my son is in medical school!)

 

[shockerfan]

No. There is nothing “free” concerning collage. The teachers and professors need to be paid as does everything else that goes along with running an educational institution. From the janitor to the electric bills this all costs money. And the idea of some young person signing up and going for a women’s studies degree, or some other nonsense like that and getting a free ride is repulsive. Such a thing would be a poor investment for sure.

Bingo! For some reason, there are people who actually find degrees for which there is no demand, something for other people to pay for. Talk about a poor return on investment. Good grief, how many Art History majors can the country possibly need?

 

[Theo520]

Tax doctors to cover cost of med school? Hmm…lets think about this:

1. In order to get into med school, one must first sacrifice and get very good grades in college. College isn’t free, and many students entering med school have debt.
2. In order to get into college one merely needs to apply to several schools of their choice, write a few essays, and pay some fees. If a person is smart about it, they might apply to one or two stretch schools, two or three schools they have a good chance at, and maybe one or two “fall backs”. Colleges accept any where from 1000 students to 15,000 students for each class (on average, depending on size of school). For med school, they only average 100 - 200 students per class, give or take. So in order to have a chance at med school, one must apply to many schools, and fly to them for interviews. This costs money…more debt!
3. When one is in med school, you’re talking $30K per year on the low side (like Baylor in Houston) to the high side of $70-80K per year on the high side)…more debt
4. In order to get into a particular residency…one has to apply to multiple hospitals…more interviews, more plane tickets, more money, and more debt (I know someone who spent $25K on this process)
5. Residents are doctors, but don’t make much
6. Finally, when done with residency, doctors start making money…like when they are 30!
7. Then, they have to pay outrageous medical malpractice insurance rates

With all that, you want to tax them??? Why make the profession, especially after Obamacare, any less appealing?

People need doctors…tax the people who need them!

(sorry for the diatribe…my son is in medical school!)

My nephew went to med school several years after graduating with a degree in Finance. He went back to school and took all the prerequisites, then the MCAT. He’s very bright and did fine but then chose an alternative route than you described. Instead of fighting for the cream schools he went to the Caribbean and is now doing a residency in the UK.

This is not the route to become a Neurosurgeon but seems appropriate and affordable to become a GP.

Re: TAX - anything special is just silly since it must flow directly into their fees.

Bingo! For some reason, there are people who actually find degrees for which there is no demand, something for other people to pay for. Talk about a poor return on investment. Good grief, how many Art History majors can the country possibly need?

Maybe if we included basic accounting etc into all liberal arts programs

 

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

A FREE COLLEGE EDUCATION is nothing more than four years of pre-school.

Remember …“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”-- Zoltan Cobalt

 

[PolarGuy]

I hate to break it to you, zoltan, but you are not the original speaker of that quote! But it’s true regardless.

 

[PolarGuy]

Allegra, you make it seem so simple. Too bad reality sets in.

If you make a certain number of credit hours free, you penalize those students who take more challenging majors with higher credit requirements. Not all majors require the same number of credits.

Further, people who advocate for free tuition never seem to want to address: who will pay for all the costs of college??? They act as if professors’ salaries are the only costs if operating a college. Do any of you posters know how much it costs to stock a modern research lab with electron microscopes? (Didn’t think so). If student loans are so high, I.e., trillions of dollars, the government AKA taxpayers will be looked to to fund that amount going forward for new students.

People who say “it’s easy!” to complex problems usually aren’t thinking them through, or lack the experience to see all sides of them.

 

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

I hate to break it to you, zoltan, but you are not the original speaker of that quote! But it’s true regardless.

Yeah…he plagiarized me…

Here is another…

“A free college education is worth what is spent on it.” – Zoltan Cobalt.

 

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

Yeah…he plagiarized me…

Here is another one…

“A free free college education is worth what is spent on it.” – Zoltan Cobalt

 

[Rohzek]

Allegra, you make it seem so simple. Too bad reality sets in.

If you make a certain number of credit hours free, you penalize those students who take more challenging majors with higher credit requirements. Not all majors require the same number of credits.

Further, people who advocate for free tuition never seem to want to address: who will pay for all the costs of college??? They act as if professors’ salaries are the only costs if operating a college. Do any of you posters know how much it costs to stock a modern research lab with electron microscopes? (Didn’t think so). If student loans are so high, I.e., trillions of dollars, the government AKA taxpayers will be looked to to fund that amount going forward for new students.

People who say “it’s easy!” to complex problems usually aren’t thinking them through, or lack the experience to see all sides of them.

Of course the tax payers will pick up the tab. It’s one of the few sensible things to spend tax money on anyhow. The fact of the matter is that we don’t have a truly public higher education system. Again, on average, only about 20% of the funding for most state schools come from the government. The funding has been cut for decades since at least the 80’s. The solution is to dramatically restore/increase government funding to our supposed “public” universities. In addition, it’s to get rid of the entrenched full-time administrative staff that has become dominant in higher education over the past 30 years. Before then, university administrations were staffed by the professors on a rotating basis. It was much cheaper and it gave professors more say in how to run the university. Unsurprisingly, college was much cheaper then and didn’t cater as much to the students with the adverse effect of limiting free speech and enacting “trigger warnings,” etc.

People are already taking 5-6 years to finish college (I did it in 3!). If food was free people would eat more. Free college = still more people hanging around college forever.

The reason people take 5-6 years now for their bachelors is solely because the cost of college is so astronomically high. Instead of wanting to endure crippling debt, many students often take less hours and work full-time jobs as a means to get by. Tragically, this has the adverse effect of increasing the college drop-out rate. In short, your thesis is pure nonsense.

Bingo! For some reason, there are people who actually find degrees for which there is no demand, something for other people to pay for. Talk about a poor return on investment. Good grief, how many Art History majors can the country possibly need?

This is such a canard. The people who are left jobless after getting a degree aren’t just people in the liberal arts, although the liberal arts have been disproportionately affected. It’s affecting the sciences too. This is hardly an argument against making college more affordable.

 

[revert_jen]

So what? Have a limit of credit hours that a students can get for free. They can take as long as they like. Problem solved.

I’m not really sure how that solves any problems. So, the person goes to college for free, and then takes the easiest courses he can find, and then runs out of credits and leaves. With no degree. And the taxpayers have now paid for four years or so of this person’s living expenses (in addition to the education) with no appreciable benefit to society.

I knew someone who did something similar at the graduate level in the UK. Much wasted taxpayer money in education and an admittedly small annual stipend, no degree at the end.

Of course you could address that sort of issue with a hugely expensive administrative overhead, to look at each student and stop the abuse after two years of wasted money instead of four. However, I do not believe we are looking for a way to increase the expense of higher education, whether it is to be paid by the people who get the education or by the taxpayers (who for the first couple of generations anyway, already paid for their own educations as well, or possibly their parents did, but given that the vast majority of people with college degrees do not come from wealthy homes, because there just aren’t that many wealthy homes, whether the student or his parents paid for the education, someone had to make sacrifices for it).

Something should be done about the huge tuition charges and student loan debts, but that definitely isn’t it. Unfortunately, it seems that the most useless huge expenses that schools have are also the things that bring in students. They’re not redoing dorms and so forth for no reason. I’m afraid that 18-year-olds are not in general the best at looking for the best value for a dollar–for one thing, society does not in general teach them to deny themselves anything (or older adults either, but older adults are more likely to have been burned by that attitude before and may have learned from it), and anyway, they don’t have to pay back the student loans. That other guy, “myself-in-the-future” has to pay them back. Instead, what a lot of them are looking for is the “perfect college experience,” whatever that means to them. I am by no means saying that there are no prudent, thrifty, value-seeking, bells-and-whistles-eschewing 18-year-olds. But if they’re in anything like a majority, then 18-year-olds have changed a huge amount since I was 18. And given the huge student loan debts that people are coming out of college with, I see no evidence for that great a change.

–Jen

 

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

Of course the tax payers will pick up the tab. It’s one of the few sensible things to spend tax money on anyhow.

WHAT? We pick up the tab for kids we don’t know? We are expected to educate a bunch of slackers who want to study “Buddhism”…i think not. You have to give me a better reason to “invest” my hard earned tax contribution.

The fact of the matter is that we don’t have a truly public higher education system. Again, on average, only about 20% of the funding for most state schools come from the government. The funding has been cut for decades since at least the 80’s. The solution is to dramatically restore/increase government funding to our supposed “public” universities. In addition, it’s to get rid of the entrenched full-time administrative staff that has become dominant in higher education over the past 30 years. Before then, university administrations were staffed by the professors on a rotating basis. It was much cheaper and it gave professors more say in how to run the university. Unsurprisingly, college was much cheaper then and didn’t cater as much to the students with the adverse effect of limiting free speech and enacting “trigger warnings,” etc.

Government funding and student loans are the reason for high college and university tuition.

If colleges and universities had to compete for students…tuition would would be dramatically lower.

The reason people take 5-6 years now for their bachelors is solely because the cost of college is so astronomically high. Instead of wanting to endure crippling debt, many students often take less hours and work full-time jobs as a means to get by. Tragically, this has the adverse effect of increasing the college drop-out rate. In short, your thesis is pure nonsense.

Ever heard of applying for a scholarship?? Or don’t they offer that anymore? Lots of MOTIVATED kids work their way through college. It provides valuable work experience that will put them ahead on the job applicant line.

Drop outs should not have been college at all. They just take up the space that the MOTIVATED need.

This is such a canard. The people who are left jobless after getting a degree aren’t just people in the liberal arts. It’s affecting the sciences too. This is hardly an argument against making college more affordable

.

Oh…come on…Have you seen some of the absolutely useless majors some people are trying to get jobs with today?

Anthropology??? Photographic arts? Social Sciences? Graphic Design? Physical Education? Liberal Arts?

There people are going to college for fun…

 

[revert_jen]

This is such a canard. The people who are left jobless after getting a degree aren’t just people in the liberal arts, although the liberal arts have been disproportionately affected. It’s affecting the sciences too. This is hardly an argument against making college more affordable.

Um. If you have a lot of people who have fresh college degrees and cannot get jobs, how does it fix anything to increase the number of people with degrees (especially by taxing the people with jobs until their eyeballs fall out)? Isn’t there some kind of supply and demand thing going on? Does every worker in the McDonald’s need a degree, instead of 1 in 10 (or whatever it is)?

I don’t disagree with your ideas on reducing university administration costs, because regardless of who’s paying for it, higher education should be less expensive. But it seems like the people coming out of college who can’t get a job are a pretty strong argument against making taxpayers pay for it, which is what the thread is about.

–Jen

 

[Tomdstone]

Oh…come on…Have you seen some of the absolutely useless majors some people are trying to get jobs with today?

Anthropology??? Photographic arts? Social Sciences? Graphic Design? Physical Education? Liberal Arts?

There people are going to college for fun…

I don’t see why these majors are “absolutely useless”?

 

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

I don’t see why these majors are “absolutely useless”?

No one who is offering a decent starting salary needs these majors.

However…Liberal Arts and English Literature Majors do pretty well “flipping burgers”.

 

[revert_jen]

I don’t see why these majors are “absolutely useless”?

I think maybe Zoltan has gotten a little carried away. Some of those majors are certainly not “absolutely useless,” although a couple of them certainly should not require a college education.

However, the problem is that these majors, and indeed any majors, are only required in certain quantities. A perfectly useful degree program creates a lot of useless instances of degrees if it turns out a much larger number of them than are needed.

–Jen

 

[Tomdstone]

However…Liberal Arts and English Literature Majors do pretty well “flipping burgers”.

I am not sure I see why creative writing is absolutely useless.

 

[Zoltan_Cobalt]

I think maybe Zoltan has gotten a little carried away. Some of those majors are certainly not “absolutely useless,” although a couple of them certainly should not require a college education.

However, the problem is that these majors, and indeed any majors, are only required in certain quantities. A perfectly useful degree program creates a lot of useless instances of degrees if it turns out a much larger number of them than are needed.

–Jen

You are right, Jen. I do tend to get carried away with a subject like this. Perhaps my list of “useless degrees” is too broad.

However I see bright young people totally confused and bewildered when they enter the job market only to find that what they just spent the last four years, a lot of their (or parent’s) money or…are now in debt for…something no one needs, wants or takes seriously.

Young people should know BEFORE they seriously consider college…what they really want and what they can expect. For instance a student who enrolls in Floral Management at Mississippi State University can expect to get a job at a florist shop upon graduation. If they are hiring. Or someone who graduated with a B.S. in Packaging from Michigan State University can send one resume to UPS and another to Fed Express and hope for a job offer.

Sorry…but I see too many young people going to college just to go to college (or have fun) without any focus at all and then, upon graduation, blame everything else because they cannot find a well paying job. We don’t hear about the thousands of graduates who do land well paying, career enhancing jobs, only because they are in the “right” industry or business.

I don’t know a solution to suggest…but I can say that “free college” is not the answer.