Always replace "free" with "I'm paying for you". I don't know what's "obvious" about me paying your tuition fees. For once, I may be happy to fund your auto-mechanic studies as I know I'll need you to fix my car. But if you're studying ancient Akkadian I'm less inclined to pay your bills.
That is like saying you only want to pay taxes towards the roads you drive on yourself.
Would you be better off if all publicly funded roads where instead private and required you to pay tolls per usage? You would defiantly get an bill more matching your usage, and people who don’t drive would pay less. But it at least feels like we are better off with public roads because they all add value to society as a whole.
The same goes for education. You don’t care about Akkadian studies, but perhaps someone does who thanks to his education can focus on that and earn enough money to buy a car from you auto mechanic keeping him in business making life better for you.
Indeed, many do advocate that paying for the roads you drive on through tolls would be a much better system. I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to subsidize certain fields of study with public money.
In the past, when a smaller percentage of people were "educated" the marginal value of educating an extra member of society was very high. It seems much lower to me now that information is cheap and freely available.
Education is not about memorizing information. It is about learning how to think. If anything, this is of much more value now that we're drowning in so much information -- and so much misinformation.
Not really. It’s more like getting outraged when the government wants to build a road that does nothing. imagine they build half a bridge over a body of water and stop. Do you want to pay for that useless thing?
I actually took an Akkadian course during my undergraduate years. It doesn't help directly with most careers, of course. But that and the other humanities courses I took there and in high school make me a better-rounded member of society.
Especially grateful for the Islamic Civilization course giving me an informed attitude toward Muslim friends and colleagues, and for my Latin and French studies helping my SAT scores and enabling me to immigrate to Quebec.
My degree was in computer science overall. Though aspects of student life and paid employment at my university helped my career and skillset way more than even the CS classes.
In my particular case, my parents paid for my education, but they could only afford that because US science education funding policies when they were students let them gain cheap entry to well-paying professions. Both of their undergraduate degrees were in the humanities.
Before that, my one grandfather who went to college got a good education at what was then a free city university, and I'm sure it helped his attitudes toward my dad's education. Many of my great-grandparents were poor Jewish immigrants at a time when the US immigration policies were extremely open for healthy light-skinned immigrants from Europe (even their low-class type).
I've had several high-paying tech jobs and paid plenty of taxes to society, but clearly these elements of my family history are factors in enabling that, not just anything about my career-related classes.
All of which is to say, we all benefit from affordable education, in surprisingly broad ways that rebound down generations and across spheres of activity. We shouldn't take a narrow vocational approach to this.
Indeed. Also please stop saying “freeway” and start saying “somebody else paying for me way” next time you’re giving directions.
It’s commonly understood that “free” in the context of public services means paid for collectively by government. We totally get that and are still cool with it.
If you are not super rich most likely you are paying a tiny fraction towards the higher education of someone else's child. Plus if you have kids you benefit from the same system. I actually know several people with useless degrees that now have well paid jobs here in Germany, one studied Ancient Greek and Latin and is now at Germanies federal reserve the other studied art history and is now a SAP consultant. Those degrees are also much cheaper than training everyone in STEM fields.
You, my fellow German (Frankfurter? I know too many people at the federal reserve...), are making the same mistake as most: beancounting and measuring everything in money. Degrees in Ancient Greek and Latin mean that besides being rich in money, society is also rich in culture. We might need more STEM probably, but we would miss the people knowledgeable in cultural things a lot.
Good luck training more than 2% of your population in math without significantly degrading the difficulty, I studied math and probably half of the people dropped out after the first semester.
"Investing" people who graduate from university earn more than people who don’t. Skills and thinking patterns developed in studying any advanced degree generalize to other pursuits. It doesn’t matter that the critical thinking skills etc were built in a subject you personally do not value. The person is improved through the process and their earning potential is increased.
Your return on investment comes later when they’re paying taxes, which are on average higher than they would have been without assistance.
At scale, this kind of investment will pay for itself. There will undoubtedly be outliers on the down side you’d be able to point to, but did you know that philosophy degrees are disproportionately represented among CEO’s?
Don’t pick the subjects, just invest in it all and reap the rewards.
It will help offset your "social assistance" costs as well. Food stamps, housing supplement, welfare... education gets people out of that.
> did you know that philosophy degrees are disproportionately represented among CEO’s?
I did know this, but I wonder which way the causality goes. perhaps CEO's are disproportionately likely to have come from wealthy families who could afford to send them to elite liberal arts colleges and/or afford to pursue a degree without direct applications.
>> Always replace "free" with "I'm paying for you".
Your thinking is flawed in this regard. Sure you are paying "my" tuition fees. But in an either indirect or direct way, you (you as the society, not necessarily you as the single person) are also profiting from my services. And as you are more than a being measured by money, but a human with a cultural background, even studying Akkadian on taxpayer's money might be ok (as long as not everyone does it).
I am a semi-libertarian myself so I get your argument somehow. Then again I am for equal opportunity (not equal outcomes) and providing education for free is a great equalizer and a great way that people can actually live up to their potential (or not, in which case they still need well educated doctors, car mechanics, whatever...). Good education also does not have to be really expensive by itself, it is a matter of organizing. When I hear the big US universities hording billions, I know that there is too much money in the system.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
