1 why not get the top say 10000 smartest people that want to study medicine and offer them free education. If some rich person is not in the top he can pay. Why would you prefer to lose some smart but poor people.
I understand that the system is super complex and if you clean it up you would probably don't need to pay more insurance or taxes though I seen there is a lot of FUD that an European like system would cost people more then already pay (I am not sure if you are in this camp)
Do you think something like Canada, UK or other countries have are not american enough for USA?
These are fair questions and I don't have real answers, just opinion based on having a good deal of exposure to other cultures and systems.
I believe one of the misconceptions in the US is that free university in other countries means anyone gets in. That is simply not the case. A very simple example I have of this is the daughter of one of our close friends who wants to study medicine in Spain. She has been preparing for a full year to take entrance exams in order to be accepted into the university. Her parents are paying for her preparation to pass these exams. Even if preparation was free, the acceptance rate will be based on how many seats are available and some weighing of results.
This means that only a certain type of student (notice I did not say class) will have access to university education, even if it is free. I get the sense some Americans think that making university free means everyone has an equal probability of obtaining a PhD. This is a fantasy. Universities can only accept a certain number of students per year and they have to filter from the total candidate population in order to reduce it down to what they are able to handle.
It is hard to argue against the potential value of free education except to point out that, at a first level, if unworthy students are accepted at the exclusion of good students we would be wasting money and valuable resources. If we are going to give someone the gift of a valuable education they have to demonstrate they are ready for it and that the probability of success is reasonable.
This, in the US, would setup yet another inequality problem. It is easy to see that kids from more challenging environments are not going to do well if they have to pass tests in order to enter Harvard or MIT when it is free. Do you exclude really good students to accept those who are almost guaranteed to fail? Why is it OK to discriminate against kids who are excellent students? Why is it not OK to tell less capable students to spend a year or two at an (also free) preparatory college and then take the entrance exam again. In other words, don't degrade standards for some misplaced social ideology. If we want to graduate excellent doctors, let's do exactly that through a process that ensures it.
And then there's the problem of how to pay for all of that. Universities and colleges in the US currently exist under a system where students are paying anywhere from, say, $20K to $60K per year --if not more-- for their education. That means that, as a business, as an organization, their financial model is entirely based on the various revenue generators available to them, one of which is tuition. This financial model cannot be supported if tuition disappears. There is no way we can pay for that structure through taxation, even if we take all the money from all the billionaires in the nations (which is another massive lie these politicians are telling).
To this point, one of the other things Amercian voters without exposure to other parts of the worlds don't understand is that universities in other nations are not as rich as those in the US. Professors don't get paid nearly as much in free-education nations as they do in the US. I mean, in the US salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year --even millions-- are a very real occurrence.
Outliers? Sure, but the reality of the matter is that free-university professors, in the US or elsewhere, simply can't make as much. The equation very quickly becomes mathematically unsustainable. However, it does not end there, there's staff and an organization behind each professor and class and those have budgets too. Simple put, if less money comes in you have to either close down or spend less.
As you noted, things are far more complex than they always seem on the surface. We can't have free education for all without addressing costs. There is no way we are going to pay a professor hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions if taxpayers are paying the bill and everything is free. At some point things have to be fair and reasonable.
Simple example, my son is at a university studying robotics. They have a two million dollar humanoid robot in one of the labs. They also have equipment and other robots costing many, many millions of dollars. These costs have to be paid somehow and by someone. My guess is that, today, that's a combination of tuition and donations. If we make tuition free, the need for cash can only be reduced by lowering professor salaries, reducing the size and breath of the organization and controlling the other costs (no million dollar humanoid). This is a reality at universities all over the world, they can't afford to be government-funded and have the same kinds of extravagant things we often see at universities in the US.
Can it be done? Sure, of course. Be we should not lie about how we would do it, and this should include a conversation about how our universities would change, how salaries would change and how access to technology and resources would change.
Yet another level of detail: What does "free" mean. In Europe and Latin America you might have free university but the cost of books and the cost of living somewhere and all of your personal costs are still yours. In the US, unlike in other parts of the world, kids leave their parents home and go to university all over the nation. In other countries is is very common for kids to go to local universities and stay home. Well, if our universities are free, who is going to pay for a kid from Las Vegas to travel to Boston and live there while attending free Harvard? That is still a significant amount of money. And that should not be a part of "free".
All of this means that, even if we make university tuition free you are going to have to filter kids based on academic performance --creating a social inequality battle-- and you are not going to pay for them living at some far away city at all. Again, things are always far more complex than they might seem on first inspection.
I don't know what the solutions might be. My gut feeling is that, in the US, the first step is to get government out of the business of financing university education. That will force universities to compete, control costs and become more efficient (financially speaking). If we do that, tuition will come down and might become very affordable. This could resolve the problem to a satisfactory level as a first experiment. Allow a natural reduction of cost through competition. Ten years later, come back and consider the idea of funding the more efficient versions of our universities to cover, say, half of the tuition. Another ten years and we cover it all and university is free. I would much prefer to see a gradual, logical and careful process towards better and cheaper education than some mathematically impossible attempt that is far more likely to cause a disaster than to fix anything.
I agree that you need to find a way to bring the costs down, I think that a lot of money are wasted, For example in Mathematics or computer science you don't need super expensive equipment, you need good professors that are good at teaching.
Some universities have buildings with cheap bedrooms for students, places with cheap but good cooked food.
What I think it happened in US is the capitalistic thing where you raise the prices until people stop buying so the final price is not the costs + some profit on top but just the maximum money you could force out from your customers , you could say that maybe true free markets can solve this but for medicine you can't have 1000 universities competing because this domain is not like math or computers, you need access to hospitals to train your students.
In the US the government guarantees student loans. This means the universities have exactly zero risk. When someone has no risk of losing money because they government will guarantee payment, they will charge and lend any amount to anyone. You can't lose.
What would happen if the government got out of student loans and did not guarantee them?
Universities would experience significantly more risk than before. And, in fact, there is no way they could charge the exorbitant amounts they charge today. They would be forced to reduce costs in order to be able to reduce tuition and, as a result, reduce the risk they undertake.
I know a kid who is going for a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and will graduate with a debt of over $300K. He was a member of the robotics team I mentor. I strongly suggested it was a terrible idea to start life with an ME degree and that much debt. It amounts to economic slavery. Well, the university, didn't care because the government guarantees the loan. So, they lured the kid in by promising all kinds of wonderful things. Sadly, in a couple of years this person is going to start to understand why I advised against taking that path.
From my perspective, the largest problem with regards to the cost of education in the US is that government disrupts free market forces. All they have to do is stop and the cost of education in the US will drop over time. Nobody in their right mind would loan $300K to an 18 year old without market distorting forces such as a 100% government guarantee.
But if the government stops tomorrow to get involved won't you get a giant backlash? I do not see that universities would stop spending and reduce the costs by 90%, if those universities are also in debt because they planned on the money they won't get you could get them bankrupt. Do you have a solution for this ?
Btw I appreciate you taking time to provide this comments.
It's a complex problem and, yes, you are correct, you can't just stop overnight. I won't claim to know exactly how to execute the removal of government from the equation.
Perhaps it starts with an announcement of a reduction of guarantees over a period of time. For example, US $40K maximum and it goes down by $5K every year until reaching zero. That would provide for a gradual reduction and a transition from a "we can't lose because the government guarantees it" mentality to universities being forced to exist in the real world.
I say "exist in the real world" because it is easy to forget that lots of people leave university with very expensive yet useless degrees. It's easy in a place like HN to think of STEM degrees. There are lots of other degrees universities get paid lots of money to deliver that do not have the earning potential of STEM degrees. Again, because government guarantees the loans universities are able to charge silly amounts for these degrees.
Not a simple problem, but I think we know that distorting the market through government involvement isn't helping anyone.
Could be there a big risk that some private companies would popup and offer students the money as lending or in exchange for a few ears of your career? Then the costs will not go down.
I would suggest a controversial thing, the government decides the maximum and enforces it, it also decides that for each subject the universities would accept a number of students for free, for the free sports there will be an exam . Who would pay for the free spots? The universities and the government will have to decide on how to split this.
With my solution I am trying to solve a possible tragedy, brilliant students that can't become doctors and engineers and have to get other jobs or are forced to work instead of study so it affects their performance, as a society we should try to identify the briliant people and help them because they will help our children in the future.
I have to keep coming back to the idea that the problem is complex and the root of it is interference with free market forces.
The other notable aspect of government guaranteed student loans is that they cannot be discharged (eliminated) through bankruptcy.
If someone ends-up with too much debt they simply can't repay society allows both people and businesses to file for bankruptcy in a few different forms. One of them provides for restructuring the debt in order to make it affordable enough to pay. The other erases all debt in order to allow someone to start over (in the case of a business it would shut down).
Credit cards, consumer loans, car loans, home loans, they can all be erased through bankruptcy. Student loans? No. They cannot. You are stuck with them for the rest of your life.
Let me give you a plausible scenario. Someone goes into medical school and, a few years into it, has a serious accident and can't continue. They never graduate. Let's assume at that point in their studies they have accumulated $200K in debt. Well, they have to pay for that. And they cannot eliminate it through bankruptcy. They are not doctors and can't earn an above-average wage, and yet they are slaves to their nice fat government-guaranteed, government-distorted loans.
Universities are guaranteed their money because the government guarantees the loans and the government makes sure you will pay until you die if that's what it takes.
In your scenario, if the government provided no guarantees and private lenders offered loans, they would not loan exorbitant amounts. Their loans, as is the case with any consumer loan, would be subject to discharge (elimination) through bankruptcy. Lenders would not take such risks without a tremendous amount of assurances as well as vetting of the candidate. There would be tremendous downwards pressure on tuition simply because lenders would not be open to providing $50K to $60K per year for most degrees, if any.
From my perspective no degree should cost more than what someone WITH THAT DEGREE can pay in, say, ten years. In other words, a software engineering degree would cost more than a history degree, because the earning potential of the student would be greater in the first case.
Another way to perhaps do it is for universities to take 10% of someone's salary per year for, say, ten years. That's it, that's their payment. The logistics would need to be worked out, but, in essence, universities would have to compete in the open market by graduating highly qualified professionals.
And yet the problem continues to be the same: Universities can only accept so many people. This is true everywhere in the world, where free universities filter people through extensive entrance examinations. Forcing education to be free isn't necessarily going to solve any problems in terms of making education available to more people. Not unless you now start over-populating universities because they are "free".
Here "free" is in quotes because the concept is vacuous. There is no such thing as free. Someone always has to pay for it, if anything for the simple matter that university employees and professors have to earn a living and it cost money to run the schools.
Every single "free" government run program in the world runs into exactly the same problem: Quality deteriorates as the amount of money available per economic unit goes down. The easiest example of this are "free" healthcare systems, where care is limited, people have to wait a very long time to be seen, quality of care and testing is substandard and their very existence depends on drugs and product developed in non-free systems (places like the US).
If universities in the US become "free", the question is: Who pays? The government? So, each university is allocated an amount of money per student? We are back to tuition, this time paid by government. Well, then, how much do we pay? Do we pay MIT the same as a local university? No? Why? Why is it fair that universities are not paid the same per student? If a local university gets $10K per year, MIT should also get $10K per year. It would not be highly discriminatory to give MIT $50K per year and a local university $10K.
You see, as we start to dive into the realities of these not-so-brilliant ideas we run into myriad problems. Everything sounds fantastic in front of a microphone during a political speech. And yet, reality tends to be nowhere near to what is being promised. It never is.
I understand that the system is super complex and if you clean it up you would probably don't need to pay more insurance or taxes though I seen there is a lot of FUD that an European like system would cost people more then already pay (I am not sure if you are in this camp)
Do you think something like Canada, UK or other countries have are not american enough for USA?