alt Hacker NewsFree to the student sounds nice, but who pays for it in the end? And does an education lose a bit of its value when anyone can get it for free?
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Your mind works in a very different way than mine.
Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance system might tick up inflation.
Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
Where is the humanity? Of course some extreme of inflation is bad, and of course we want people to be employable. But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
(And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech about the need for H1B).
Not anyone. Some kind of test is required for admission. I am thinking like the UK system.
Also if you are being $ focused then offer it where there is ROI: STEM, medicine (allow more doctors too).
Education doesn't lose its value if it is free. Does food and water? Shelter?
Unless people are just tuning out of their degree and it is just a social thing. In which deal with that specific problem.
Educated people get better paying jobs. More pay means more payed taxes as well. If you have a smart tax system with progressive tax, that's a real lever.
It sounds counter intuitive, but more taxes is more fair and better as a whole. To prove, it takes no more than to look up correlation of amounts of taxes with percentages of homelessness (and other such indicators) between western countries.
Free to US citizens would be a better policy, the state investing in its own people.
That's one of the most uneducated ignorant things I've heard anyone say in this entire discussion.
Does health insurance also lose its value when anyone can get it for free?
The pretending to not understand how public services work shtick is so tiring.
Everyone understands that public services are free to use because they are funded by taxes. It's not the gotcha you think it is. People say that roads, K-12 education, etc are "free" when they mean there is not a direct fee to use them because they are paid for by the government using tax dollars. You don't have to pretend to not understand this