1. At 12K/year, base education runs a cost of 156K 2. At 20K/year, college education for 4 years runs 80K 3. At 20K/year, college education for 40 years runs 800K
Then what we're saying is 80K represents 50% of the educational costs we're all comfortable with sinking into base education. But letting someone never work and just go to college for free for 40 years would cost over 400% of the base educational costs. That seems like a totally different scale of issue to me. We're also probably hitting diminishing returns over what 4 years would prepare someone for, and I don't think the audience is that large. Most people want to go to college to get skills to then contribute something to society, whether or not today's economy specifically values what they want to contribute.
You're making assumptions that we're all comfortable with paying for 12 years of education. I think the majority of that is a waste of time (and by extension money).
> Most people want to go to college to get skills to then contribute something to society, whether or not today's economy specifically values what they want to contribute.
Sure but I don't want to pay for that either. If people didn't get hand outs that hide the true price of college (i.e. government backed loans), the price of college would come down drastically. It's artificially inflated to match amount of money a student can expect to beg / borrow.
If there was going to be any type of "college for all", the only approach I'd advocate would be free education that was provided by the government itself (i.e. community colleges). At least that would have a downward pressure on tuitions at private institutions that would suddenly have to price compete against it. Anything else will just increase the problem further.
> Sure but I don't want to pay for that either
I left a comment in another thread, but the amount of shit that is in the budget leaves every American with a feeling of "I don't want to pay for that". The DoD budget alone clocks in at over 8x the projected cost of free college education, very few people talk with vitriol about the hand-outs we're creating for the myriad of people that make up that apparatus.
> It's artificially inflated to match amount of money a student can expect to beg / borrow
I'm not as well read here as I'd like to be, but I have a hard time understanding how this is going to be such a magic fix. Professors aren't going to be too keen to take a pay cut here, and state universities aren't exactly making out like gangbusters right now. Is the idea that we'd have less students and less professors? What's the economic impact of seeing those jobs, and the dependent jobs in school communities, eliminated?
