Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Free tuition at US public Universities?

Except that as a practical matter college is the new high school.

And there is no reverse switch to pull.

That's the REAL problem, Jon.

What about the responsibility of others to you and yours? After all, you may be able to finance the education of your children, but how comfortable are you knowing that your "responsibility" is significantly increased because of rampant corruption? (we've already covered what a sinkhole college athletics are... now here's the icing on the cake: http://www.thehoya.com/bcs-system-rife-with-corruption-1.2648473 )

Or what about when your "responsibility" is increased because of cosmetic expenses that have nothing to do with the quality of the education your child receives? Shouldn't the people making those decisions be held responsible?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-us-news-college-rankings-hurt-students/

Bostonian, your words here sparked something inside for me. I don't believe that nature favors the affluent when bestowing IQ skills. So it must be that the affluent just happen to have a better chance to take advantage of their IQ in this country. Back home, public schools are not funded by property taxes but come from the State or Central Govt's general funds. So, you don't have to be rich to attend a good school district. The public schools I attended were truly mixed SES. So, a high IQ child from a economically disadvantaged family had the same advantages as one from an affluent family. Of course, the affluent sent (and still send) their kids to fancy private schools but still. Same is true for the public undergrad university I attended in my home country. Truly mixed SES with the only common trait among us being higher than average IQ with the dedication to succeed in a very rigorous academic environment. Many of those rich kids with average IQ that paid top $$ to attend the private schools ended up in private colleges and not the prestigious public ones.

I grew up in a system where you got into university if your marks were high enough, and the government paid for it. It's public education, after all. People who weren't university calibre had other career training opportunities. The government paid for healthcare too.

Of course you pay for it through taxes, but it's so much simpler this way.

And it basically works out fairly in the end. People who earn more due to their education will pay more in taxes, so they ultimately pay for their education after all.

Poverty (generally) causes a reduction in IQ scores. Thanks, chronic stress and cognitive load!

And I think when people say "IQ" they really mean "development arc over a lifetime" which nobody seems to talk about.

I think that a lot of the comments espousing college costs and debt as personal responsibility reflect the American "you're on your own" attitude to society. Personally, I think this ideology misses the point that college education in a population benefits society as a whole (crooked bankers notwithstanding). Which is why it's subsidized in many other countries.

Also, I don't get the distinction between personal responsibility with respect to paying for college (or a trade school) and lack thereof in K-12 education. And what about paying for roads, street lights, the fire department, or the police? If you're going to embrace personal responsibility, you should embrace it all the way, not cherry pick. So if you want light outside your house, you should pay for streetlights yourself. And if someone robs you, it's your fault for not having a more secure house and you should pay for the cops to do an investigation. Ditto for your house burning down because of, say, wildfires. Even if the fire was started by someone else and spread to your place, why should my tax dollars pay for putting out your house or stopping the fire before it gets there? I mean, seriously, your house benefits no one but you and your family and maybe a friend or two. BTW, why should my tax dollars fund your kid's K-12 education? Etc.

IMO, there's no difference between the societal need for public fire departments and the societal need for college-educated people. These people typically pay more taxes than they would have otherwise and spend more money in restaurants and shops. They write new software, solve old problems in science and medicine, and so on. Sure, they benefit personally, but so do fire fighters and the people who pave the streets. It's not like those people are working for free.

I suspect that people have these debates because paying for college has mental inertia in the American mind, not because there's some huge philosophical difference between subsidizing college and subsidizing 11th grade or the fire department.

According to you college education benefits society, but that's an opinion that others may not share. It's certainly debatable as to what percentage of a population should be educated to what degree, and at what cost.


A legal distinction has been made. It may be arbitrary, but a line needs to be drawn somewhere.


Why do you say that? A middle ground is often a popular option.


You don't see a difference between a government that:

A) Works to discourage theft, property damage, and other crimes while giving victims a way to recover damages in the form of compensation

and

B) Pays to educate the population for 16 or more years, with dubious benefits?

You might find this interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

There are those who see the duty of government is primarily to protect negative rights. It's a pretty clear-cut distinction that allows for a middle ground between anarchy and authoritarianism that isn't arbitrary.

Ahhh-- but our government also protects intellectual property, NATIONAL intellectual property, etc.

We also have a federal government to regulate trade and commerce. Yes?

Few people, even hard-core free-market folks, would want our government to step completely out of the business of those two line items in its mandate.

An educated native (non-foreign) populace is essential to those activities, because foreign work-visas do not allow for some work which there is national interest in keeping, well, proprietary.

If we don't really HAVE enough people to do that work, then we risk losing competitive advantage internationally as we lack the means to prevent the dissemination of that information.

An educated populace is also necessary to run a democratic republic, and while the level of that education is certainly open to debate, the necessity of critically thinking and fully literate adults most certainly is not.

When fully 1/3rd of American adults can't embrace basic science I have to presume that this is a function of scientific illiteracy on a breathtaking scale. There are similar examples across many different domains, it's not just STEM.

So while I agree with the personal benefit/personal responsibility mandate to some extent (people tend to devalue what they are given for free), I do disagree that education doesn't produce "benefits" for society as a whole.

The scientific funding that happened during the period 1940-1970 has produced the tech industry-- and to no small extent, the biotech industry-- that powers so much of our economy today. That funding went largely into higher education, national defense/laboratories, and the space program.

It has also been argued that the GI Bill, which educated a generation of veterans (and in LARGE, large numbers) produced a similar economic power-boost.

Without a control group to compare with, I don't know how valid it is to assign causation. But it certainly seems reasonable.

A few additional thoughts on that subject:

http://www.rockinst.org/pdf/education/2010-03-18-A_New_Paradigm.pdf

http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/the-link-between-higher-education-and-economic-dev.aspx

http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ956731


That last one looks quite interesting, as it compares various strategies. Note that I've deliberately avoided those sources which might be best termed "suspect by virtue of conflict of interest-- that is, educational institutions themselves... though this of necessity eliminates much of the more rigorous scholarly work on the subject.

This, I think, probably summarizes my own feelings on this subject quite nicely. It's not entirely liberal/humanist philosophy that drives a desire to fully subsidize higher education.

http://www.nas.org/articles/Higher_Education_and_Economic_Growth

It's also not incompatible with my innate frustration at the ever-lower expectations and quality in primary and secondary education which we HAVE fully subsidized, on the other hand.