free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.
How is free college a giveaway to the wealthier third of society? For starters, I can assure you the wealthy care a lot about the name of the institution issuing the diploma, and they can afford it. They'll happily front extra cash so their kids can network with people of similar economic status.
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
I'm not pretending to not understand here. Someone said it would be free and I'm asking how. The fact that "free" doesn't mean free is the problem, not an issue of me misunderstanding.
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).
Well yes, I can talk to two different points when the context is different. A good conversation isn't just people shouting their personal opinions, its people playing off of the discussion at hand and considering different angles.
> Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
That's actually not what I was saying, I may have phrased it poorly. I did not mean that I worry about anyone getting educated. I was simply trying to point out that a degree has much less value when anyone can get it, like that's because it is free as is the topic here.
In the other thread I wasn't actually concerned about inflation personally, only pointing out that inflation will go up if a large amount of student debt is made to just disappear. I was raising that as a prediction with high likelihood, personally I have opinions on the underlying approach but I don't really have dog in the fight either.
Why take that at face value? Its generally used for wage suppression[0][1] by big companies (not only in tech) and due to how its structured, creates an unhealthy power balance between employers and H1B employees
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-024-05823-8
[1]: https://www.paularnesen.com/blog/the-h-1b-visa-corporate-ame...
> But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
What artificial scarcity are you talking about here?
I'm not trying to say we need artificial scarcity, university should be a market like any other product or service.
Personally I tend to go even further away from most when it comes to scarcity in the job market too - I'd rather have open borders than immigration systems that limit how many people can come here and compete for jobs.
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.
I don't know the ins and outs of the UK education system, but I have to assume the facilities and employees are still paid for.
> Does food and water? Shelter?
If everyone had access to it for free? Absolutely! I wouldn't work as a farmer or build houses if no one had to pay for those products. Value, or price in this context, is only really feasible for scarce assets. If something is seemingly unlimited and freely available it will have no (financial) value.
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.
As long as you let universities act like for-profit businesses, their profits will be the only thing they optimize for.
Does health insurance also lose its value when anyone can get it for free?
Though yes, financially health insurance also has no monetary value when anyone can get it for free. You can't assign a price to it and anyone in the health insurance business is entirely at the whims of what the government is willing to pay them to provide a service deemed essential enough to subsidize the entire cost of the product.
People get free insurance but hospitals get fixed amounts of cash allowing them to admit fixed amount of patients
In this scenario the answer is yes, it loses some value. Still much better system than private care in US