I'm going to make an argument I imagine many here will disagree with: perhaps the solution to the cost problem is to have publicly financed post-secondary education?
Imagine this: the US government tells colleges it will pay $N per semester on behalf of any student who meets certain qualifications to attend that college. Colleges would be free to refuse to accept this, but with the exception of the Harvard/Yale type schools, any college that did refuse the public tuition would cease to exist because nobody would go there. As long as we can come up with a value for $N that keeps colleges funded without making them rich, it would work. I would submit that the ideal value for $N is much lower than the current average tuition.
How do you pay for this? Take it all out of military spending. There would be plenty left over, I assure you.
> Another side of effect with less graduates is that maybe we can get rid of the college degree requirements
I would argue that there are definite benefits to a more educated population. Just because a certain group of people are going to end up with jobs in a field that don't really require post-secondary education doesn't mean that society as a whole isn't better off when those people are more educated.
I'm of the opinion that many of the problems the US faces right now are more or less the direct result of an uneducated body of voters.
Only if that $N cap must cover a minimum of near 100% of the salary could that even have an impact, IMO.
Without minimum coverage it's just a subsidy that will drive the cost of college up even more since every student would be able to afford a minimum of $N. It's virtually identical to the current loan landscape.
Example (broad strokes):
Student Grant / yr Minimum Coverage
$5,000 100%
$10,000 98%
...
$50,000 90%
Couple this with removing government backed student loans for undergraduate altogether and now you've got a reasonable out-of-pocket maximum spend per student per year. In this table it would be $5k for a $50k school - if the school wants any gov help they have to manage their own tuition costs.
Obviously this would be sort of a disaster at first and these numbers are probably silly, I have no clue what the process of coming up with these numbers and adjusting them (somewhat less than 1200% over 30 years) would even look like.
Sorry, I was unclear: the idea would be that a college that accepts the $N tuition would be prohibited from charging the students attending any additional tuition.
Note that this is how things work in many European countries (e.g. Sweden): universities cannot charge any tuition from students, but they get a certain amount of money per student from the government. This way the government can control the price exactly, so there are no risk of runaway tuition levels.
Yes, this happens, and it results in one of two (or both) logical reactions:
1) schools accepting any students and doing the filtering at the outflow instead, kicking out people that should not have passed the entry test after three years of studies.
2) schools lowering the bars and just pulling through them as many students as possible, because you need a lot of balls to do 1) and there are not that many balls in academic environment
The correction mechanism is twofold, and in-place throughout Europe: a) Universities must publish employment statistics with indicators for salaries at different horizons; b) Students have k years of extra runway to graduate or drop out. Dropouts cost school budget.
They correct both errors. One almost immediately, the other when/if the market recognizes low graduate quality.
> schools accepting any students and doing the filtering at the outflow instead
I'm not arguing that anybody be allowed to go to college on the public dime. There would need to be some sort of qualification involved. Otherwise we would see shoddy colleges pop up that admit everybody that applies.
What that qualification would be is another problem entirely of course...
> 2) schools lowering the bars and just pulling through them as many students as possible, because you need a lot of balls to do 1) and there are not that many balls in academic environment
In my opinion, this is already a significant problem in the US. Short of having standardized exams required to earn a degree (a bar exam for every discipline), it's not an easy problem to solve.
First off too many people who do not need a college education are pouring money into one. Second the United States, nor any country needs the numbers of college educated people they already have.
Come up with a standard program if you must. We have standards for public education so let us have them for a college education. It cannot be that hard to establish the minimum required for each degree and then determine the cost of that education. With a standard costs will come down.
Uneducated voters, it is not from a lack of college. Public schools are not there to create critical thinkers. They are told day in and day out how the government makes it all possible. Top it off with thousands of assistance programs and why would you expect people to better?
" it will pay $N per semester on behalf of any student who meets certain qualifications to attend that college"
Well right off the top how do you define "qualifications". I mean if your answer is (and this is a question not a statement) "meets certain testing standards" or "belongs to certain clubs and does certain activities" you will almost certainly disadvantage certain students that might get accepted because the total "package" of them (as a student and a person) balances out the student body.
Then what we will have is even more of a system that feeds students in that are trained in high school only one way - to test well. This of course has already been happening with test prep however my feeling is any "qualifications" will push us more in that direction.
> Well right off the top how do you define "qualifications"
Well, I don't really know. I agree with you that standardized testing is not a good way to do this.
Perhaps a system where anybody can attend but the public tuition stops being paid for them if their GPA falls below some threshold? But then you get the problem of shoddy colleges popping up that accept everybody and give everybody good grades. I think restricting the public tuition to non-profit schools would help solve that problem, in addition to strict caps on salaries of different classes of university employees. As long as people don't see running a shoddy university as a way to make money for themselves, they'll probably stay away from it.
I'm going to make an argument I imagine many here will disagree with: perhaps the solution to the cost problem is to have publicly financed post-secondary education?
Imagine this: the US government tells colleges it will pay $N per semester on behalf of any student who meets certain qualifications to attend that college. Colleges would be free to refuse to accept this, but with the exception of the Harvard/Yale type schools, any college that did refuse the public tuition would cease to exist because nobody would go there. As long as we can come up with a value for $N that keeps colleges funded without making them rich, it would work. I would submit that the ideal value for $N is much lower than the current average tuition.
How do you pay for this? Take it all out of military spending. There would be plenty left over, I assure you.
> Another side of effect with less graduates is that maybe we can get rid of the college degree requirements
I would argue that there are definite benefits to a more educated population. Just because a certain group of people are going to end up with jobs in a field that don't really require post-secondary education doesn't mean that society as a whole isn't better off when those people are more educated.
I'm of the opinion that many of the problems the US faces right now are more or less the direct result of an uneducated body of voters.