Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The price is too high!

This may depend upon...
Which degree programs?
How many of their graduates?
What important roles?
Which society as a whole?

As mentioned upthread, the American society is based largely upon reciprocity.
- Some examples of participation by choice: charities, go-fund-me and other online contribution systems, health insurance -vs- self-pay.
- Meanwhile taxation is compulsory: National Debt incurred by what we spend now is foisted on the next generations, who have no say in the matter.

On the contrary, your participation in any insurance program is optional, I force you to do nothing.

What is "smart" for your may not be "smart" for me. I shouldn't have the option to make you fund what is smart for me, especially when I have other options.

On a side note, the U.S. military has a whole bunch of openings for employment with the side benefit of paying for your college tuition and teaching valuable leadership and discipline qualities. As a tax payer I'm already funding that option. If one isn't willing to invest in themselves, I fail to see where it's my responsibility to invest in them in their place.

At 18 you're an adult, you become your responsibility at that age, responsible for your actions and responsible for your own well being. You stop being the responsibility of society. At this point, anything you receive from society is a gift and should be of free will.

The challenge is, however, that higher education isn't solely a private good whose value is captured solely by its recipient (the student). It's a public good that confers externalities on society through higher average SES. A more educated populace is one characterized by:

- Less crime (and its attendant public costs- insurance, incarceration, rehabilitation, victim restitution, property damage/loss, fatality and injury costs, etc.),
- Lower health insurance costs (because poverty is correlated with food insecurity and less nutrient-dense diets),
- Less unemployment (and its attendant social insurance costs),
- A lower incidence of mental health (which raises labour force participation and income earning),
- Higher tax remittances (through, on average, higher incomes)

It is all well and good to extol the virtues of private charity, but such an argument neglects the reality that education of the individual carries a social ROI that you are not accounting for. At the very least, from a purely agnostic financial perspective, it is economically rational for the state to fund public post-secondary education up to the value of the public externality enjoyed from a more educated populace.

Please note that my discussion is purely one of financial metrics, and doesn't even go into the improved service outcomes on a quality-adjusted basis that arise from a better-educated professional workforce. (e.g. better access to medical care; higher quality K-12 teachers; improved public policy formulation; safer infrastructure; more targeted and effective legislation and recourse to legal institutions; etc.)

Some may see the premises to more closely resemble:

1) The cost of a 4 year degree is too high and rising, I recognize this as a societal problem, and I'm willing to be responsible, creative, and aware of current and future consequences as I make the sacrifices necessary to determine my calling and the education I need to attain it and fulfill my purpose.

2)The cost of a 4 year degree is too high and rising, I recognize this as a societal problem, but I want entitlement today and have my children, grand-children, and great-grandchildren pay for it in the future.

For an analogy, do you identify a malignant tumor and try to transplant it into your progeny so you may live unfettered?

Yes, some of us may recall this from prior forum discussions and therefore may not have made the astute observation which Old Dad made upthread, here.

And yet the literature on public economics is clear that the long-term efficient outcome for any given individual, ex ante, is a pooling equilibrium in health insurance. An individual such as yourself may be a "low risk" insuree currently, but your long-term risk profile will differ from your evaluation of your risk today.

This is the challenge of many investments; people are unable to accurately assess their individual risk profile and do not take a Bayesian approach to pricing their risk as new information arrives over time.

A parallel argument exists for upside risks, such as investments in human capital. If we're rational, we ascribe population averages to individuals. However, after that point, we don't properly account for differences in information as those individuals approach the frontier of post-secondary credentialing.


This assumes that all individuals are eligible for military recruitment. Because of the correlation between low SES and poor health outcomes, over-reliance on military education as a funnel for access to post-secondary training may be inappropriate for the poor, and may disproportionately penalize the most physically or mentally vulnerable.



And yet society is responsible for the effects of so-called adults' behaviour if it is costly to society, either through crime, unemployment, untreated mental illness, physical disability, or behaviours which perpetuate inter-generational poverty and abuse.

Education is a known lever which prevents those downside expenditures. Reliable quantitative techniques exist to calculate the break-even point where the trade-off between extra educational spending offsets the cost of additional social program spending due to its absence.

This is a fallacious argument. There exists a spectrum of expenditure options which can, on a publicly revenue-neutral basis, provide some financial offset for the costs of post-secondary education for those who need it most.

Sadly, political pressure to avoid even evaluating such options fosters continued, unnecessary poverty for a segment of the population that--under well-designed programs-- would cost the public NOTHING on net to remediate.

You don't have to participate in society, either. You could go live on an island somewhere and pay no taxes. If you choose to live somewhere else, you're accepting the responsibilities that go along with the benefits of said society.


What?

Back to the medical analogy, just by participating and financing other people's treatments, you're pushing down the cost of treatment while advancing knowledge of how to do so. All this will benefit you further down the line, because regardless of whether you or your loved ones ever get a malignant tumor, the odds that none of you ever get an expensive and difficult condition are, assuming you live a normal life span, nearly zero.

You do have a choice, of course, but it's basically like putting all your money on 13 on the roulette wheel. Most people would calculate those odds and determine that it's not a smart bet.


I can endorse the leadership and discipline qualities, which is why I appear to grasp social responsibility at a level far beyond you. As for paying for college, you shouldn't believe everything you read on a recruiting poster.

And finally, don't pretend you're performing any kind of charity by funding the military. You're benefiting far beyond your contributions, and most of the individuals involved are grossly underpaid. There's a reason why "thank you for your service" has become a thing.

You're welcome, btw.


You stop being the responsibility of society and start being responsible FOR society. That's what being an adult in a society means. You're basically arguing that you should be able to accept the gifts of living in a society, with none of the responsibilities.

Aquinas, please remember that correlation does not imply causation.
- What is your source?
- Do you have studies which go beyond correlation to prove causation?

Families of recent legal immigrants from South American countries have spoken of leaving a society in which education was touted as the answer when the economy softened... leading to cities full of PhDs working as baristas... in which crime prospered, especially hold-for-ransom kidnappings and if the family could not pay, the kidnapped daughters were taken across the border and sold as sex slaves.

While one might hope that education would lead to ethics, accountability, etc, possibly it is not the academic courses themselves but the accompanying process of developing internal locus of control which research shows to be a highly valued outcome of post-secondary education.

Some think that weasel language is obnoxious, and that some should say what they mean without hiding behind semantics.

You're making the faulty assumption that the only way to tackle the problem is to subsidize it. That's very unimaginative.