Since you like data, take a look at the stats: while horrifying and I wish it were 0%, campus violence is probably pretty insignificant and maybe even lower than what occurs in the general population.
It should be financed by taxes, which includes caveats like eliminating virtually useless degrees like music education, drama, fashion design, anthropology, etc. People who want that can pay out of pocket for private institutions.
That may just go to show how much you might be caught up in your bubble. All of that is a still very much active part of the human experience. Although technology has brought us great comforts and raised our living standards, art, music, anthropology, social sciences in general do absolutely have value to a great many people and contributed to a raised living standard in other ways.
Even if we decide the only relevant criterium is the free market, people pay for the ability to do these things, and for good reason, just as they pay for the ability to use and develop technologies.
I think it would be a great loss to all of humanity if we suddenly stopped paying for social science education.
In a nutshell, and a bit polemic: What do you want humanity to be, a great many cogs in a science machine churning away without looking sideways? I would not want that.
Do we actually need social “science” and other soft degrees, though? Aren’t these non-rigorous paths the sort of thing people can learn on their own (for free)? How are other nations tackling these sorts of advanced hobbies?
They're sort of self-selecting over an extended period of time. While your degree may sound interesting it won't attract too much talent when there are not relevant job openings and every graduate ends up pivoting. Of course, demand does not zero out which is probably a good thing.
The only degrees where this selection mechanism seems to have inverse effects are business management related ones.
Funny enough, my degree was in business management and it was basically useless except for the accounting and economics classes. I eventually pivoted to software dev (self taught).
In one model, when the universities negotiate for government funding, one key factor is the number of degrees of various kinds they are expected to produce. That has interesting effects on admissions.
Some fields have highly competitive admissions, because the number of people willing to study them far exceeds the demand for graduates. This may be because the field promises a well-paying high-status job (e.g. law, medicine) or because it is inherently interesting (e.g. social sciences, biology). In other fields, particularly in STEM, admissions can be easy, because the demand exceeds the number of capable and interested students.
Construction, mining, and oil extraction are also very much an active part of human experience. Doesn't mean that people need a degree to do it. In fact, people in these industries often work highly skilled jobs where they are required to operate heavy machinery where one mistake can kill people, and all with only a high school education. Degrees are completely unnecessary, and anything that can be learned in a university can be learned outside of a university.
It's nothing but an arbitrary choice that there is an art degree, but not a heavy machinery operation degree, and not the other way around. This is all class based gate keeping, and should never be formalized and funded by tax money.
Construction, mining and oil extraction firms make plenty of use of people with geology and engineering degrees, particularly in jobs that involve doing research and calculations.
Seems fairly obvious why three years of sitting in classrooms and libraries isn't seen as a particularly useful way of demonstrating aptitude for operating heavy machinery.
The practice of art and music is much more conducive to a classroom setting and peer group experimentation & discussion than the practice of operating mining equipment, yes. Though a degree has never been a requirement for being a practitioner in those fields, and much of the study focuses on the theory. Universities also welcome many people interested in studying the theory of heavy machinery, and award them engineering degrees.
Financing by taxes but having the state determine which degrees are "useful" is a poor combination that falls victim to all the usual mistakes of centrally planned economies. Is the Education Department bureaucrat in charge of deciding which degrees are useless really going to completely align with your narrow view of the world?
If you want to defund the areas of education that don't provide value, you should favour less government intervention, not more. Let the market fund education by having employers or financiers preferentially fund (through loans, or otherwise as discussed in TFA) the students who are more likely to enrich them later on.
Education Department or equivalents sure do set targets at least for professional degrees, at least here in Finland. For others a bit less so and universities have quite a bit of autonomy on what the exact subject fields are. One easy "market" way of doing some selection is to drop subjects which don't get enough applicants.
A lot of education doesn't necessarily produce "value" in short term bean counter sense, but are very important to for example retain culture and knowledge.
Also, to apparently great shock of many, there are a lot of people who don't select what to study based on what is "more likely to enrich then later on". Most people don't care much about being rich, and the ones that do are probably quite miserble.
Here in Sweden university education costs less per head than high school education. Then of course, there's money for research, but we pay for that separately.
In Russia there's the Independent University of Moscow, which probably doesn't have any expenses other than the salaries of the professors.
What a university needs is skilled scientists and well-prepared students willing to work hard, and that isn't expensive.
But if they aren't properly prepared they'll require individual tutoring. There are probably some university students that can't even do their calculations mentally and sit there writing furiously when doing problems on exams. Obviously that should have been dealt with when they were 13 or something, but it rarely has.
Interesting. Back when I was in uni, the university offered a 6 week prep course that would recap/teach the basics that were expected in the first semester.
So enrolled students could choose to take that course to brush up on or learn these fundamentals so everyone was (in theory) on the expected skill level. Other than that there was pretty much no hand holding - 18+ year olds are considered adults after all.
Yes, not when I studied either. We similarly had such courses, but they're brush-up courses, not courses teaching the deep fundamental skills that I believe are needed.
It worked fine, but I believe that with real training in doing algebra and calculus mentally can get you further, but that this training takes more time and requires actual tutoring if you want the broad masses of suitable-for-university students to acquire the skills.
When I say calculations I mean doing algebraic manipulations, not arithmetic.
I have a strategy: first it try to do it mentally, if I can't I start doing it on paper, then once I solve it I wait for a long while and then I do it mentally.
My impression is that that kind of thing isn't really taught and I believe it needs to be taught.
IMHO, the problem, especially in the US, is that you pay the premium not for the knowledge but prestige and alumni access. Essentially, you pay for a bling. Education should be freely accessible, and one of the best things that came from Eastern Bloc is a high-quality (free) education anyone could have, which means that I don't believe in that complex financing talk very much. For a start, take a small percentage of taxpayers' money that goes to the military and redirect it to education.
Especially for prestige. And there isn't a way to make this cheaper as the exclusivity is part of it.
I quite like the German system here, there isn't a large prestige difference between universities. Of course there are some that have a better reputation for some topics, but it's not so much that it would seriously affect your chances to get hired later. You can get a pretty good education for free, and there isn't as much effort and drama around applying for universities like in the US.
>one of the best things that came from Eastern Bloc is a high-quality (free) education anyone could have.
It was not free at all. It was payed with confiscatory taxes, total lack of freedom to choose anything(some guy will choose what you will do the rest of your life when you are a kid). People in charge made sure their children had the best education with schools that were only for the children of the people in the Party, or the people that lived in the big cities like Moscow, Leningrad, with internal passports that forbid people to move from second-class cities to first class, like in China today.
Not to talk about the fact that over 30-40% of the "high quality education" material and time was actually indoctrination in Marxism like also remains in China today.
By the way, in the Eastern Block something like 90% of the money went to internal repression(secret services and Police) and the military. Prestigious engineers could only work for the military.
And no matter how much educated you were, they could make you lose your job if you did not behave and make you into a garbage collector.
I know because I had family members that came from the Eastern Block.
And in the rest of Europe, the education in cities like Prague or Warsaw, Budapest was way better before they became occupied.
In the US, all the prestige undergraduate (bachelors degree. age 18 to 22) universities are cheap for kids of most families.
If you are paying through the nose for a bachelor’s degree and not from a rich family, then that means you are getting bamboozled at a private school when you could have bought the same “prestige” at any number of cheaper state schools.
While the US is definitely an outlier (especially in private universities), remember that:
1. It's not just education per se, it's public _research_ in universities that takes up a lot of the funding, and that is expensive. And the marriage of higher teaching and research is a solid principle (often identified with von Humboldt, the Prussian minister of education who successfully promoted this model of a university).
2. Cheap tuition is often/usually the lesser part of funding, with the major being state budgets and donations by individual benefactors and commercial companies (or in rare cases, profits off of university endowments).
General taxation. The generation currently working pays for the education of the next generation. Society prospers, economically and socially, as a result
It is a model that is pre-existing though. My parents paid property taxes that funded local schools that I didn’t go to. I pay property tax for my local schools, but I don’t have children.
1. There are more taxes other than income tax. Corporate income tax for one. Estate taxes, financial speculation tax, VAT - each world state and its own system.
2. Even regarding income tax - in most world states, tax is not flat, and most workers pay little income tax anyway (sometimes even 0, if there's a threshold for non-zero tax rate, or tax credits for various social situations etc.)
So not regressive. Also, like other commenters mention - if you don't attend university, your children, or other relatives and friends, might be. Plus, we all need the higher education system to function, for modern society to function, so it makes sense that we contribute to it through some mechanism.
Tax rates are based on income. The less you earn, the less taxes you pay. So in that sense, you could argue you don't pay for the higher education you never received.
But beyond that, there is a deeply flawed logic behind indicating the tax would be "regressive" just because you personally don't benefit from it. So long the taxes are reasonably efficiently allocated (by macroeconomic standards, not by business standards) and increase a societies overall well-being, the vast majority of people benefit from it, either directly or by proxy.
There are debates to be had which kind of "services" benefit from this scheme of financing the most, but being from a country where higher education is publicly funded and having benefited from this accessibility of higher-ed as well, I can see the merits of this scheme in the context of higher-education.
Sure, they have to pay for those who get an education. In return, they get doctors to help them when they are sick or injured, lawyers to aid them when they are wronged or do wrong, engineers to make sure buildings do not fall on them, and myriad other benefits.
‘Conversely, if everyone's education were free, then there wouldn’t be a good way to determine a) which specific programs ought to have different prices because of the supply and demand for that kind of credential, b) whether particular people might be better-served by spending their time in different ways, or c) when we're allocating too much of society's resources to education, in the aggregate.’
a) If the education is free, there's no need to determine _prices_ for different programs, is there? There is a need to decide how many places to offer in each programme, but this is an easier problem.
b) Particular people may decide for themselves without a prohibitive cost factor, thank you very much.
c) When has this ever been a problem? If we want to allocate close to zero to begin with, it is another problem.
In other words, free education for all is basically alright. It is hard to attract the best educational talent in this setting because salaries are usually capped and one can always make more in the private sector, but a combination of job security and high prestige is usually enough to have decent staff.
> It is hard to attract the best educational talent in this setting because salaries are usually capped and one can always make more in the private sector, but a combination of job security and high prestige is usually enough to have decent staff.
"Non-capped" salaries usually mean low median salary and very high salary for a few people with 'star' status for whom strings get pulled. And - that status, even in academia, is rarely due to stellar intellectual achievements. Rather, all sorts of fashionable business-related gurus expect to rake in large amounts of cash.
A unionized academic faculty in universities, and a not-corrupt-and-bought union, allow for decent faculty salary. Add the benefit of relative autonomy in choosing one's research directions, and a tenure track that one actually has a chance of getting into, and it's an extremely attractive proposition.
> It is hard to attract the best educational talent in this setting because salaries are usually capped and one can always make more in the private sector, but a combination of job security and high prestige is usually enough to have decent staff.
If you're talking about universities here, the job security is really bad. Until you get tenured that is, but most people doing teaching at universities will never get one.
Also most university staff is there foremost to do research, but with some teaching strings attached.
I'd say most people in academia aren't in it for the money, and there are a lot easier/safer ways to get money if that's what you want. A part of it may be prestige, but more important are interest in the work and quite a bit of freedom to do what you want and how. And belonging into a community in deeper way than "just doing my job".
I literally spat out my coffee reading that. Have you even been near
a university in the past decade? They are filled with miserable,
neurotic, anxious, demoralised husks of people who once thought they
could make a difference in the world. "Academics" are broken people
in a broken system, labouring under zero-hour contracts, callous,
toxic management and clueless deans and chancellors who are at least
two generations out of step with reality. The university system has
effectively destroyed higher education. There is nothing of value
left there, least of all security or prestige.
I have worked at about 6, in 4 different countries. Yes, most employees have a bad deal, but there is always a core of permanent teaching stuff who do have a pretty good deal (cf. https://www.amazon.com/Good-Work-You-Can-Get/dp/1421437961).
It is a tragedy that the system produces much more people who really want to be in the system than what it can reasonably employ at the moment, but as for retaining enough good teachers to give a decent education to students, it works both in countries where education is expensive (US, UK) and where it is essentially free (Germany, Israel).
Well if we're comparing experience, I've worked at about 30
universities in dozens of countries over 30 years and I see no
evidence whatsoever that at present it "works" or that permanent staff
are any happier or secure than anyone else. The thing we can agree on
is that it's a "tragedy". Maybe 20 years ago it wasn't like this. But
let's quit living in a P. G. Wodehouse mythology.
Academia seems like a very variable experience, depending on your ambitions and so on.
If you want to bring in funding, have phd students, and publish a lot of papers it’s a lot of work, and in a lot of fields PhDs are massively overproduced, and you’ll suffer through endless postdocs.
On the other hand, this is one of the only places you can get paid to do pure maths, and you can choose what you work on, and you get called professor, and you can’t be fired, and you’re surrounded by 19 year old girls? Good luck finding those employment conditions anywhere else!
All great, until you grow up, get married, have children, reach your
intellectual prime and realise that you should probably contribute
something real to the world.
That's when the cloisters of "academia" start looking like prison
bars. You realise you're surrounded by institutionalised infantilism,
involuted bureaucracy, and frighteningly insecure people. Being a
"professor" relishing power over 19 yo girls isn't what a mature life
is about.
But hey, it's not just academia. I know many from the military and
other services who hit their mid 30s and quit, not through lack of
career advancement, or money, or through physical fatigue, but because
they were surrounded by man-childs and stuck in a classist, sexist,
self-serving culture akin to a boys boarding school.
Institutions profoundly arrest self-development and I think they
attract people who are in a sense "stuck in life" but lack the courage
to assert their real, full potential.
Anyway, we keep selling "university" as some Hogwarts themed funfair
ride to young people who can't afford it. That's why I got out. It's
so awfully unethical. I'd rather build pedagogical and research
relations with grown-ups who I can treat as equals and who have some
skin in the game.
The main problem today in the US education is precisely financing.
It created ultra expensive education as Universities do not have to constantly evaluate the quality/price relationship as everybody else needs to. They just raise their prices and people pay(because they do not know how much effort it will take to pay it back).
It looks good on paper until the bubble pops. The same happens with Real State.
Most of the time, a degree is a waste of the student's time. Not to even mention the money aspect. People mostly do them due to peer pressure not actual value. Basically higher education should be reduced 75-90%.
The first thing should be to incorporate modern technology to cut costs. That means the internet. All publicly funded education should be required to offer their classes and degrees remote. This will barely raise costs and will lower tuition to trivial amounts. At this point there won't need to be any debate about how to fund higher education because with economies of scale permitted by the internet, the costs aren't enough that anybody will want to argue over them.
Don't want to offer your degrees to anybody who is willing to pay the price and can pass your tests? Then you are welcome to decline all government funding including student loans.
> Don't want to offer your degrees to anybody who is willing to pay the price and can pass your tests? Then you are welcome to decline all government funding including student loans.
What a horrible take on the topic at hand.
1. Pay what price? If it's free, then it won't matter.
2. Standardized tests aren't currently pass/fail.
3. Student selection isn't based on tests alone.
Under this proposal, why even bother having more than one public post-secondary institution?
Now that we only have one publicly-free college, the value of degrees from all of the schools that are fine eschewing government funding are going to skyrocket since graduating public college will be the equivalent of passing high school (in the US).
All quality students would flock to those private institutions and be content paying tuition knowing what a huge advantage they'll have in the workforce.
The value of a degree is based on exclusivity under any system. We can gatekeep on difficulty to pass and not on money. There is no need for a preselection/admissions process when courses can scale infinitely over the internet. That is a relic of a time where a lecture could only be given in a room with a limited number of seats. The only thing limiting degree issuance can be the ability to pass the classes.
65 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadEven if we decide the only relevant criterium is the free market, people pay for the ability to do these things, and for good reason, just as they pay for the ability to use and develop technologies.
I think it would be a great loss to all of humanity if we suddenly stopped paying for social science education. In a nutshell, and a bit polemic: What do you want humanity to be, a great many cogs in a science machine churning away without looking sideways? I would not want that.
The only degrees where this selection mechanism seems to have inverse effects are business management related ones.
Some fields have highly competitive admissions, because the number of people willing to study them far exceeds the demand for graduates. This may be because the field promises a well-paying high-status job (e.g. law, medicine) or because it is inherently interesting (e.g. social sciences, biology). In other fields, particularly in STEM, admissions can be easy, because the demand exceeds the number of capable and interested students.
Just because some fields don't (pretend to) have formalized theories, it doesn't mean the study isn't rigorous.
It's nothing but an arbitrary choice that there is an art degree, but not a heavy machinery operation degree, and not the other way around. This is all class based gate keeping, and should never be formalized and funded by tax money.
Seems fairly obvious why three years of sitting in classrooms and libraries isn't seen as a particularly useful way of demonstrating aptitude for operating heavy machinery.
If you want to defund the areas of education that don't provide value, you should favour less government intervention, not more. Let the market fund education by having employers or financiers preferentially fund (through loans, or otherwise as discussed in TFA) the students who are more likely to enrich them later on.
A lot of education doesn't necessarily produce "value" in short term bean counter sense, but are very important to for example retain culture and knowledge.
Also, to apparently great shock of many, there are a lot of people who don't select what to study based on what is "more likely to enrich then later on". Most people don't care much about being rich, and the ones that do are probably quite miserble.
In Russia there's the Independent University of Moscow, which probably doesn't have any expenses other than the salaries of the professors.
What a university needs is skilled scientists and well-prepared students willing to work hard, and that isn't expensive.
But if they aren't properly prepared they'll require individual tutoring. There are probably some university students that can't even do their calculations mentally and sit there writing furiously when doing problems on exams. Obviously that should have been dealt with when they were 13 or something, but it rarely has.
So enrolled students could choose to take that course to brush up on or learn these fundamentals so everyone was (in theory) on the expected skill level. Other than that there was pretty much no hand holding - 18+ year olds are considered adults after all.
It worked fine, but I believe that with real training in doing algebra and calculus mentally can get you further, but that this training takes more time and requires actual tutoring if you want the broad masses of suitable-for-university students to acquire the skills.
What calculations? There were no calculations in my Applied Physics finals in 1977.
I have a strategy: first it try to do it mentally, if I can't I start doing it on paper, then once I solve it I wait for a long while and then I do it mentally.
My impression is that that kind of thing isn't really taught and I believe it needs to be taught.
I quite like the German system here, there isn't a large prestige difference between universities. Of course there are some that have a better reputation for some topics, but it's not so much that it would seriously affect your chances to get hired later. You can get a pretty good education for free, and there isn't as much effort and drama around applying for universities like in the US.
It was not free at all. It was payed with confiscatory taxes, total lack of freedom to choose anything(some guy will choose what you will do the rest of your life when you are a kid). People in charge made sure their children had the best education with schools that were only for the children of the people in the Party, or the people that lived in the big cities like Moscow, Leningrad, with internal passports that forbid people to move from second-class cities to first class, like in China today.
Not to talk about the fact that over 30-40% of the "high quality education" material and time was actually indoctrination in Marxism like also remains in China today.
By the way, in the Eastern Block something like 90% of the money went to internal repression(secret services and Police) and the military. Prestigious engineers could only work for the military.
And no matter how much educated you were, they could make you lose your job if you did not behave and make you into a garbage collector.
I know because I had family members that came from the Eastern Block.
And in the rest of Europe, the education in cities like Prague or Warsaw, Budapest was way better before they became occupied.
If you are paying through the nose for a bachelor’s degree and not from a rich family, then that means you are getting bamboozled at a private school when you could have bought the same “prestige” at any number of cheaper state schools.
1. It's not just education per se, it's public _research_ in universities that takes up a lot of the funding, and that is expensive. And the marriage of higher teaching and research is a solid principle (often identified with von Humboldt, the Prussian minister of education who successfully promoted this model of a university).
2. Cheap tuition is often/usually the lesser part of funding, with the major being state budgets and donations by individual benefactors and commercial companies (or in rare cases, profits off of university endowments).
and you're paying for a service that's free to all. it's a principle. whether or not you use it doesn't matter, that would be selfish.
2. Even regarding income tax - in most world states, tax is not flat, and most workers pay little income tax anyway (sometimes even 0, if there's a threshold for non-zero tax rate, or tax credits for various social situations etc.)
So not regressive. Also, like other commenters mention - if you don't attend university, your children, or other relatives and friends, might be. Plus, we all need the higher education system to function, for modern society to function, so it makes sense that we contribute to it through some mechanism.
But beyond that, there is a deeply flawed logic behind indicating the tax would be "regressive" just because you personally don't benefit from it. So long the taxes are reasonably efficiently allocated (by macroeconomic standards, not by business standards) and increase a societies overall well-being, the vast majority of people benefit from it, either directly or by proxy.
There are debates to be had which kind of "services" benefit from this scheme of financing the most, but being from a country where higher education is publicly funded and having benefited from this accessibility of higher-ed as well, I can see the merits of this scheme in the context of higher-education.
You’re investing in society, with an expected payout in the future (via retirement benefits).
What’s crazy to me is we have a whole generation who failed to pay for maintaining the machine — but who expect to be paid out anyway.
Seems like a worthwhile investment.
"Equality of opportunity" becomes even worse a bad joke when a prerequisite for higher education is to be born to well-off parents.
a) If the education is free, there's no need to determine _prices_ for different programs, is there? There is a need to decide how many places to offer in each programme, but this is an easier problem.
b) Particular people may decide for themselves without a prohibitive cost factor, thank you very much.
c) When has this ever been a problem? If we want to allocate close to zero to begin with, it is another problem.
In other words, free education for all is basically alright. It is hard to attract the best educational talent in this setting because salaries are usually capped and one can always make more in the private sector, but a combination of job security and high prestige is usually enough to have decent staff.
"Non-capped" salaries usually mean low median salary and very high salary for a few people with 'star' status for whom strings get pulled. And - that status, even in academia, is rarely due to stellar intellectual achievements. Rather, all sorts of fashionable business-related gurus expect to rake in large amounts of cash.
A unionized academic faculty in universities, and a not-corrupt-and-bought union, allow for decent faculty salary. Add the benefit of relative autonomy in choosing one's research directions, and a tenure track that one actually has a chance of getting into, and it's an extremely attractive proposition.
If you're talking about universities here, the job security is really bad. Until you get tenured that is, but most people doing teaching at universities will never get one.
Also most university staff is there foremost to do research, but with some teaching strings attached.
I'd say most people in academia aren't in it for the money, and there are a lot easier/safer ways to get money if that's what you want. A part of it may be prestige, but more important are interest in the work and quite a bit of freedom to do what you want and how. And belonging into a community in deeper way than "just doing my job".
I literally spat out my coffee reading that. Have you even been near a university in the past decade? They are filled with miserable, neurotic, anxious, demoralised husks of people who once thought they could make a difference in the world. "Academics" are broken people in a broken system, labouring under zero-hour contracts, callous, toxic management and clueless deans and chancellors who are at least two generations out of step with reality. The university system has effectively destroyed higher education. There is nothing of value left there, least of all security or prestige.
It is a tragedy that the system produces much more people who really want to be in the system than what it can reasonably employ at the moment, but as for retaining enough good teachers to give a decent education to students, it works both in countries where education is expensive (US, UK) and where it is essentially free (Germany, Israel).
If you want to bring in funding, have phd students, and publish a lot of papers it’s a lot of work, and in a lot of fields PhDs are massively overproduced, and you’ll suffer through endless postdocs.
On the other hand, this is one of the only places you can get paid to do pure maths, and you can choose what you work on, and you get called professor, and you can’t be fired, and you’re surrounded by 19 year old girls? Good luck finding those employment conditions anywhere else!
Sure, if those are your priorities.
All great, until you grow up, get married, have children, reach your intellectual prime and realise that you should probably contribute something real to the world.
That's when the cloisters of "academia" start looking like prison bars. You realise you're surrounded by institutionalised infantilism, involuted bureaucracy, and frighteningly insecure people. Being a "professor" relishing power over 19 yo girls isn't what a mature life is about.
But hey, it's not just academia. I know many from the military and other services who hit their mid 30s and quit, not through lack of career advancement, or money, or through physical fatigue, but because they were surrounded by man-childs and stuck in a classist, sexist, self-serving culture akin to a boys boarding school.
Institutions profoundly arrest self-development and I think they attract people who are in a sense "stuck in life" but lack the courage to assert their real, full potential.
Anyway, we keep selling "university" as some Hogwarts themed funfair ride to young people who can't afford it. That's why I got out. It's so awfully unethical. I'd rather build pedagogical and research relations with grown-ups who I can treat as equals and who have some skin in the game.
It created ultra expensive education as Universities do not have to constantly evaluate the quality/price relationship as everybody else needs to. They just raise their prices and people pay(because they do not know how much effort it will take to pay it back).
It looks good on paper until the bubble pops. The same happens with Real State.
Don't want to offer your degrees to anybody who is willing to pay the price and can pass your tests? Then you are welcome to decline all government funding including student loans.
What a horrible take on the topic at hand.
1. Pay what price? If it's free, then it won't matter. 2. Standardized tests aren't currently pass/fail. 3. Student selection isn't based on tests alone.
Under this proposal, why even bother having more than one public post-secondary institution?
Now that we only have one publicly-free college, the value of degrees from all of the schools that are fine eschewing government funding are going to skyrocket since graduating public college will be the equivalent of passing high school (in the US).
All quality students would flock to those private institutions and be content paying tuition knowing what a huge advantage they'll have in the workforce.