We used to have this Enlightenment ideal of a Liberal Arts Education. It served as job training, sure, but it also tried to make its recipients better citizens and more adept thinkers and more capable adults and, broadly speaking, more effective human beings in a bunch of socially and culturally important ways. I'm optimistic that free college tuition would be a net gain for the economy, but I also strongly suspect that it's worth doing even if it costs us some economic growth.

Besides, if someone wants to take a 4 year vacation, they're already well within their rights to just not get a job and do whatever they like with their early 20s right now, presuming they can cover their living expenses somehow. Free college tuition doesn't actually allow anyone who wouldn't otherwise be able to to slack off, but it does give them something socially positive to do with their slacking.

Essentially they do heavy tracking, if you can't cut it in the college track, you get put into blue collar training and apprentice programs. This is why they are such an industrial powerhouse still - they have a well prepared white collar and blue collar work force.

In Germany it's easy to be put on one of the two lower tracks which lead to apprenticeships [1], because you didn't do well in primary school. At that point is harder (but still possible) to go to college. It also leads to segregation because immigrants who don't speak German at home are unlikely to do well in primary school.

[1] Calling it blue collar is a bit of misnomer here because you can also do apprenticeships in white collar jobs, even software engineering.

You can also almost always switch tracks, the farther down you are one track the harder it gets to switch up. I went for the second lowest (Realschule) and then went to a tertiary school (Fachoberschule). With that I can study in a University for Applied Sciences (different from normal University).

The german education system has many options open, the general push in the lower two tracks is to get you into a job as early as possible (there are lots of job fairs I went to) but still permit you to pick any of the other 20 options.

Yet I ended up through a apprenticeship in Software Engineering and I could go back at any time and finish my 12 years then go to university. Part of me wants to go study and get a degree, but all universities I inquired at rejected me for not having 12 years despite working for 8 years now.

Conceptually, it's nice to imagine a purely meritocratic system wherein everyone may ascertain the level of potential they desire, but the US is living through the hangover of centuries of systemic racism.

The only way this tracked solution could be truly fair is if access to education was universally available and equitable; in our current reality, what it actually would mean is that those who can afford the best education in K-12 will be highly over-represented in the college track and those who cannot will be under-represented.

So in the end it turns out to be an anti-meritocratic solution.

Eh, 9-12 public school maybe. The dirty not-a-secret of K-8 is that it's effectively state-sponsored daycare as well as an educational system, so its role as a holding pen is a feature rather than a bug.

Until you've seen the difference a good elementary education can make for a kid growing up in The Bronx, I'd say hold off on the snap judgement.

I'm a child of teachers, and I know quite a lot of people who teach in inner cities or narrowly made it out of impoverished towns because of good education. There's a reason I said "as well as an educational system", and I definitely don't believe the daycare role of schools is a reason to cut budgets or cut schooling.

Educating kids is hard. Many people lack the time, knowledge, and resources to substantially educate their children themselves. Many students benefit from years of often-repetitive teaching to ensure information is available when they're developmentally and environmentally ready for it. I don't doubt any of this, and I absolutely think public schooling is a sensible solution to it.

My point was only that "you could say K-12 education acts as a state sponsored vacation" misunderstands the role of schools as daycares. Non-educational time at school isn't a vacation, it's a public service for two-income households that struggle to afford daycare. I'm not talking about teaching kids math. I'm talking about the existence of three-recesses-per-day kindergarten, or middle schoolers sitting in voluntary, teacher-run study hall after school.

The district I grew up in had a public debate about whether to move to half-day kindergarten, where the two sides were "it'll cut school costs" and "it'll cost parents more in daycare". No one even claimed it was an educational debate, because less than half the day was spent on education. None of this has anything to do with whether teaching literacy in the Bronx is important.

I'm simply asserting that "provides childcare for free" is an intentional benefit, not an accidental drawback, of public schooling.

To the extent that I'm upset by education-as-daycare, it's only because I think they ought to be separate public services so each one can be done more efficiently. But that's a serious pipe dream, so for now I'd rather just double the budget of what exists and trust that the people involved are well-meaning enough to use it sensibly.

Going back for high school felt almost painfully slow. I don't think kids need to be crammed with as much information as possible, but you could probably double the content without leaving most people behind.

It's probably utopian, but I still think a lot of problems could be solved by paying kids for marks. There are lots of arguments made about intrinsic motivation to learn being enough, but learning is also difficult and uncomfortable. Some extrinsic motivation to develop a functional learning style might be exactly what those currently underachieving are missing.

I don’t know if you understand how difficult it is to teach 12 year olds but that’s a miracle not daycare.

I don't mean at all to say "it's not education". I did get educated in a northeastern public schools, I had a lot of excellent teachers who worked incredibly hard and committed their free time and money to education.

My point is that K-8 public schools are both source of education and - intentionally, explicitly - daycare alternatives. Not "school is useless, it's a holding pen", but "schools intentionally provide non-educational support for parents including childcare".

My public school had full-day kindergarten that was about 70% recess. When budget cuts hit, there was a public discussion of whether to go to half-day kindergarten, and the two sides were "it'll save money" and "parents will have to pay for childcare". My district had after-school activities with no real educational value to help keep kids occupied until ~4PM, and then another hour of unstructured study hall after that. The formal purpose of the thing was to provide a place for kids who didn't go to daycare or go home alone.

I don't even think this is a bad thing! The parent comments suggested "free college is a vacation" and "well by that light, so is K-12 education". My point was that children don't take vacations, and the daycare role of primary schooling is a benefit, not a hazard.

In New Zealand, you can leave school when you're 16 and start an apprenticeship. I think that by 16, most people will know if they're definitely not going to be going to university, and I think that 11 years of schooling is enough to set people up with the basics for life. It's the point where (at least in New Zealand) you start specialising, picking specific subjects that are going to help you with, or be required for, university

I’m not the kind of engineer that has a STEM only mindset and I see a lot of value in good Liberal Arts education, but let’s be realistic -- whether it’s because of nature or nurture, there are plenty of college freshmen who are just not going to be intellectuals. Even if it was free (and it would never really be free), it's not a positive thing to encourage them to spend four years majoring in communications or the like.

It does seem like this baseline understanding does shift with progress though. For example our ancestors did not need a lot of education to push a plow, but more education will be needed with the continued elimination of physical labor.

In Spain there is a limited number of open position in different studies. You get an test and people is sorted by their grades. The people with higher grades get to the college they choose. It is not perfect as people in better neighborhoods get better education and can get more easily to college. But at least, it is closer to a meritocracy and costs less money.

> as an excuse to take a 4-year vacation

If you don't pass a minimum of credits the first year, you get kicked out. A lot of people doesn't pass this phase.

There is ways of solving the problems, but you need a government with willingness to do it.

If you are right, what data can we rely on to determine when it makes sense for a person to go to college and when it does not make sense for a person to go to college?

"In a report released Monday, the Census Bureau said 33.4 percent of Americans 25 or older said they had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s a sharp rise from the 28 percent with a college degree a decade ago." [0]

66.6% of Americans don't have a bachelor's degree or higher. So what is the appropriate percentage of Americans to have a college degree? Which other countries in the world are too educated?

[0] http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/326995-census-more-a...

The current trend is to run universities and colleges "like a business." In this model, students (and their parents) are the paying customers. The mantra of good customer service is "the customer is always right." This is ultimately the source of much of the grade inflation[1]. If you tell your customers that they are "wrong" by not giving them the grades they prefer or by making them work harder than they would like for those grades, they will react in ways that ultimately hit your bottom line. Undergraduate education should not be like a vacation. Any student who treats it that way should be flunked out after their first term.

Having taxpayer funded "free" (or dirt cheap) higher ed wouldn't fix these problems over night, but it would help remove some of the weird incentives that are currently undermining the core mission of actually educating people.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/29/survey-finds-...

In practice this isn't a problem, at least not in France where my partner studied. Students that qualify for free public education are in the top of their class for the year. In order to keep qualifying for free education they must keep their grades up. So this idea of students graduating high school, waltzing into a university, then screwing off for four years is pure fiction.

How could this not be popular? Where will would be without the next generation of literature, teachers, artists? Society would start to suck.

Not to mention, money shouldn't be the barrier for entry to keep admissions in check if you want one. Viability should be. Universities already screen for good candidates. Change the screening to suit.

On top of that, you still have to be succeeding in uni to stay in uni

If a few freeloaders get a degree they don't need. Would society have lost anything but money?

One such would be computer science. Until computers came around the underlying algorithm and associated fields were pure math. If people hadn’t been able to study pure math then there wouldn’t have been an entire wing of mathematics available for CS.

This is what I've heard about a lot of places that provide good higher education. I would be concerned in the US that college readiness correlates a little bit too closely to familial wealth.

When a course in a university has more applicants than slots, the required grades are lowered (1 or 15 being best, 6 or 1 worst depending on your previous education) until the number of applicants fits into the number of slots.

Since all previous education is free, family wealth matters little (though it still plays a role)

It is not like it was a vacation. In most cases, you still have to pay a rent, food, etc ...

And you commit several years of your life to it, that's the most precious resource you can give.

I can't believe I am discussing this to be honest, that's an insane argument.

Poor people get scholarships, get dismissed from university cost even.

And aside from wealth, everyone can repeatedly enroll in classes for many years (although if you don't pass you have to payback what was given to you) and waste everyone's ressources for useless, unfinished degrees (hello first year of sociology or other bullshit).

It seems to be something in the echo chamber of HN / startup world that has become common over the past 5-6 years. They seem to not understand that having a college degree is pretty much a requirement for any decent-paying job these days or hopes to have one that will in the future. From an economic standpoint, people with degrees have higher wages.

The real issue is the cost of colleges and the loans that people take out to attend. Rather than addressing that (though some commenters have made the attempt) they'd rather say for kids to not go at all and thus limit their future opportunities for work as well as intellectual growth.

Compared to a 9-5 job, yeah, college was a five year vacation. There's no boss that will have nasty conversations with you, if your work isn't done, if you fall behind on assignments too much, you can just choose to not do them, and spend an extra hour or two cramming for the midterm + final. Nobody cares if you sleep through a class, or two, or seven.

... Obviously if you went to a difficult school, or don't have the social safety net of living with your parents, or you had to work full-time to pay for school, your experiences might be different.

If you went to college voluntarily and did not care about neither the monetary constraints nor the opportunity costs, then sure that's a vacation. I suspect pretty much anything can be framed as such under those circumstances. For most people, this is not actually a realistic option.

Your situation might not be extremely rarefied, but I don't think you grasp the immensely insurmountable advantage you have in this scenario.

Really though, people might choose to go to college to see what they are capable of and take on a challenge with the possibility of failure already planned. They might already know they can do an alternate career path as well.

The idea that everyone will have their life planned out before college is silly. I certainly have no idea how well I would do in every college degree program. I could be great, or I could suck.

Those things cannot be done over the Internet easily.

Educated people are crucial to successfull companies, thereby creating more jobs.

Educated people are crucial to a healthy democracy, where populist politicians have less chance of getting elected.

I would argue that it's probably more important for the entire society for someone to get a good education than for the person himself. Therefor education should be subsidized.

That sounds perfectly healthy on an individual level, and tolerable on a societal level. Perhaps even necessary if you consider the deterioration of discourse in this country.

Also, It's not like food and housing becomes free when tuition is removed.

I have no real opinion on that idea, or any idea how effective it would be, so I'll say nothing more.

Realistically, having college remain free helps people who later in life want to change careers, but need some education to do so. We pay a lot of lip service in the US to retraining the workforce, yet do little to facilitate the training.

I will happily pay for everything, a full ride, as a parent or a taxpayer, if the student does the work.

We don't have to pay tuition to Ivy League to get a better more educated workforce.

So if you can pay for it, you are welcome to take your AA classes at a state 4 year, if not, we'll get you a free transfer degree from a local community college and at that point, you can choose between trade, tech, or a major at a 4 year school.

If we detach, 'everyone gets free school' from the idea that we need a more educated workforce to maintain our standing in the world, we can work toward a solution that is a net positive in society and not just a panacea for people who feel they've been left behind.

If you just subsidize school and not living expenses, then it removes the incentive to treat college as a free vacation. Since if you have no desire to learn, you're not going to waste time taking classes (even if free) and scraping by on a part time job when you could just work full time and have a lot more free time since you're not "wasting" time in school.

* We stopped educational subsidies for students with poor grades (ideally, gradually to give the student a chance to feel the pressure and correct)

* We equally subsidized trade schools (ideally, even college dropouts or older people could access these subsidies at least once)

Then I went to the US to study....

Boy was I wrong!!! Having to pay for university had zero influence on the seriousness of the students I met. In fact I'd claim it was much worse than my experience from different European countries with free University.

What I realized is that if it is not government money it is going to be somebody elses money and that is frequently American parents. American students did not seem to be any more concerned about wasting their parents money than Norwegian students are concerned about wasting government money.

Again I think it is worse. Over the years, looking at this in more detail I think we are completely overestimating the effects of financial incentives. People are not really optimizing homo economicus. A lot of other factors matter equally much or more.

It is also about what society promotes and values. American society offers no respectable vocational training programs, and does not promote or value that path. Look at Switzerland and Germany which values this and provide great vocational schools. A lot more people go down that route and get skills to get well paid jobs without burying themselves in debt.

It is actually half decent in Norway as well since our system is closely modeled on the German system, however we have suffered from being too heavily influenced by the American view on education. Luckily there has been a push to change this and promote vocational training, causing more people to take that route.

However you can't get people in America to make sensible educational choices, when private schools are shamelessly misguiding student to reap more profits and society is pushing the idea that you can't make a good wage without going to college. Never mind the unhealthy American habit of thinking "anybody can be anything." American optimism can be great for launching google and facebook but it can be poisonous to people of average skill and talent who are deluded into thinking they can be anything they want as long as they work hard enough.

I think you got to work both on attitudes, what the school system offers, the values promoted. Financial incentives can be structured in many ways which doesn't need to punish people severely.

E.g. here in Norway you don't pay for school but you have living expenses, so you get a government loan and stipend to deal with that. As you pass classes they convert increasingly larger part of your student loans to grants. This gives a carrot to anybody to attempt to finish the study in reasonable time.