this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Scholarships that only exist in the first place because we have privatized higher education, which is privatized because of greed.
Or because its better. Just a thought
I've got about $25,000 reasons why it is not in fact better.
That's it? That was less than one semester for mine
It may not be much in comparison to others, but that doesn't make absolve me of my debt. Practically every other developed nation has this figured out, it's long past time we caught up.
Damn mine is like $5000
It's only better if you think the opportunities from higher-education should only be accessible for those with a wealthy "bank of mom and daddy" or willing to have a heavilly narrowed scope for risk-taking (such as entrepreneurship) because they start their professional lifes already with less assets than liabilities. (Its not by chance that all celebrated US entrepreneurs of this Age are the scions of at least high-middle class or wealthier parents)
If however you mean it in the Economic sense of the US being as wealthy as possible, then it's not better: maximizing the access to opportunities is the best way to get the best people for a job doing that job quite independently of who their parents are, as that delivers the maximum productivity, and that's especially important at the high-value-added professions which are the ones for which higher-education is usually needed - limiting access to higher education and hence high-value-added jobs on the basis of money actual goes against making the US be as wealthy as possible as only a fraction of the most competent people to do those jobs have a chance to get them. In fact the problem in the US is so bad that the country has to import foreigners on H1B visas because it can't even train enough people for some high-value-added jobs.
All this is just the rightwing, purelly economic argument. I haven't even touched "leftie" things such as Equality.
I'm not saying that college shouldn't be accessible to the masses. It is and there are scholarships, state funding and loads to support it. What I'm saying is that we should spend tons of tax dollars on college. The government already spends enough we don't need to blow away more money by paying this exorbitant prices.
Also the cost of tuition varies widely by where you are going.
Well, I agreed that's a more subtle take on the whole thing.
A hard-nosed take aiming purelly for maximization of tax take in this domain, requires finding a balance between the additional revenue that well educated people will bring to the taxman (not just directly but also indirectly as, for example, they enable other jobs to add more value) vs the money spent now by the taxman to educate them. This purelly economic take does bring considerations about "what is the future tax value of different degrees" and requires that pupil selection uses as meritocratic as possible criteria - and access to money is definitelly not and indication of merit for a degree - so that university education delivers the best people for the job at the end hence maximizing wealth production and thus tax revenue.
Clearly higher-education for everybody for free would not be tax-optimal but that doesn't mean that not-universal higher-education with money as the main criteria to filter access to those limited places is better. Certainly the current method in the US of restricted access through ridiculously high fees and a statistically meaningless schollarship mechanism (outside sports schollarships it's minimal and training athletes is seldom justifiable by economics) to pull it a little bit away from the pure monetary filtering criteria, is also far from delivering economically optimal results and hence a higher return.
Somehow other countries manage to have a huge fraction of the population have access to higher education for pretty modest or even no fees whilst still having a higher per-capita income than the US and require importing far fewer, if any, degree-holding immigrants to generate that higher per-capita wealth, so that would indicate that what's done in the US now is not at all optimal.
It's valid to look at higher education as something that consumes resources hence cannot be available with no restrictions whatsoever, but if there is indeed limited access and your objective is the best possible return for the country's economy or even just the taxman, managing the scarcity that comes from the existence of a limit on the provision of it via a pure pricing mechanism won't deliver the best economic return for the country or even the taxman because theirs is a strategic interest that goes far beyond maximizing the revenue of universities, which is the only thing that higher university fees optimize.
There might be an optimal fee point for the taxman and the economy, which is not zero, but exceeding it reduces the future returns for both because it makes increasing numbers of people who are "the best for the job" in those high value added domains requiring such a degree to not take the degree, so less competent people end up doing the job hence less wealth gets produced and taxed.