> The real problem is voters want lower taxes, and some genius figured out a way to tout lower taxes and tax payer assistance to students, hence student loan debt.
Rather, university education in the U.S., like healthcare, is insanely expensive compared to other countries. Why is that?
1. Non-selective. We admit 70% of high school graduates to University whereas in Germany they admit 1/3.
2. Too long/unfocused. University education can last 5-6 years in the US for a bachelors, whereas in Germany it is limited to 3 years. You don't get to drift around as "undecided" and change your major, you apply to the school with a specific major. You don't get a lot of choice as to your electives and follow a pre-planned course of study (for the most part).
3. Too many frills. European schools don't have massive sports stadiums, athletic departments, or other amenities similar to US universities.
4. Too much staff. Our universities are massively overstaffed with everything from diversity officers to football coaches to teams of counselors.
Put this all together, and you have a very expensive, inefficient, gold-plated system focused on catering to student whims rather than to taxpayer efficiency. Of course tax payers don't want to pay for it -- why should they? If you want European style funding of universities, you need European-style spending levels and rigor. If you want an experience that is half as selective, takes twice as long, and offers absurd amenities that have nothing to do with university education, then you are going to have to pay for that out of your own pocket rather than asking for taxpayers to provide this experience for you.
The good news is that you can find relatively inexpensive higher education in the U.S. if you are a good student and are willing to attend community college for the first two years and a local state school for the rest. If you are good enough to be admitted to University in Europe, then in the U.S. you should be able to get a scholarship. Of course most US university students would never be admitted to University in Europe in the first place -- so having an option to pay a lot to go might be better than not having an option at all. But I suspect that we would be better off adopting a German style trade school system to absorb 50% of high school graduates as well as a more rigorous high school system, but that would require adoption of tracking and letting most students know that they are not going to be on the university track. In that type of environment, sure, taxpayers would be willing to fund the enterprise since they would only be spending 10% more than they are spending now to match German-level of tertiary education spending.
In France 100% of high school graduates are (by definition) admitted to University, and more than half of them indeed decide to take that path.
"Typical" university education lasts 5 years. (Though I wouldn't be surprised if only a minority actually makes it.)
It's mostly free, students from poor families get grants, though there are limits on how many times you can retry university years while still getting a grant.
The result : in 2014, 45% of the 25-34 year old French had a university (or other superior education) degree, compared to 28% of the Germans. (OTOH I suspect that the quality of that education is not nearly as good ?)
So France is an example where they spend 1.12% of GDP on tertiary education, about 12% more than Germany, and as a result they get a lot more university students, but their labor market overall is less skilled, and French schools -- similar to Italian schools -- are broke and their employees are paid less.
So these are the kinds of trade offs to make -- e.g. what percent of your labor force do you need to have a college degree? This is going to be a characteristic of your economy and providing college degrees to more people than this is going to create a skills mismatch.
A lot of people think the reverse is true -- e.g. that if you train a lot of people to build bridges, then you will have a bridge building economy. But I am of the opinion that knowledge is activity specific, so if you want to have a lot of people who are bridge builders, then you need to actually build bridges, and the university diplomas you need will follow as people scramble to learn how to build bridges to get the good bridge building jobs they see in the economy.
So why does Germany have a more skilled economy even though fewer attend university? Because it's an export monster, that swells the number of high skilled jobs needed to much more than would be the case if they were producing only for their own market.
China is in a similar position -- they want a hundred million engineers, and if that means building a bridge across every river in Africa then that's what they will do. The Belt and Road Initiative is nothing more than an attempt to export infrastructure because they've already covered their own country with empty apartment buildings, unnecessary airports, and so they need to build infrastructure elsewhere. Curiously only 5% of the population attend university in China, and yet they are an economic powerhouse by doing -- and learning by doing -- rather than academic diplomas.
India is an example where they overtrain lots of people in IT relative to domestic demand, and of course what happens is that people emigrate to where the jobs are. Again, you don't transform your economy with university education, anymore than you can transform your car by washing it. You transform your economy by cultivating productive ecosystems and then making sure there is demand for their output.
Whereas we in the US think that we can shut down manufacturing, outsource jobs, and yet have a high skilled economy if everyone goes to university. It's not the case, we have a much lower skilled labor force than Europe and the university graduates have a hard time finding good jobs and repaying their student loans.
So bottom line, the goal should not be to send everyone to college, but to send those people who need to go to college, and if you want more people to need to go, than work on cultivating more high skilled employment in your economy rather than building more universities.
IMHO jobs and economy are secondary. University is first and foremost about having educated citizens. And you can't do that in school because you need the freedom of not being forced to go to class and freedom from your parents too.
And in a lot of jobs, you don't need much more than some core knowledge, and being independent enough that you can learn on your own - you can't teach a specific job at the university, that's what internships are for. Teaching jobs, (outside of technical schools), is the responsibility of the companies.
Note that the overwhelming majority of engineers, especially bridge ones in France don't come from the University system - but rather the élite ingénieur schools - maybe a bit like the US Ivy League ?
(There's the super-élite school literally called "Bridges and Roads")
Those get a disproportionate amount of funding, but aren't that relevant to the discussion, since they only teach a tiny minority of students (~5%).
I recently came upon an interview with Oliver Faron, administrator of one of these élite schools, which has a specific focus on education of people returning to superior education. They also have an especially good record with 20 times better results with technical (="low-quality") high school graduates than universities.
(I guess that extra funding and the self-selection of the most motivated students might have something to do with that ?)
And his dream is to have a mandatory year of university to replace the long-gone mandatory military service, so that the different social classes get to "live together" again ! (More than one year would probably make for diminishing results?) :
https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-conversation-scien... (fr)
> IMHO jobs and economy are secondary. University is first and foremost about having educated citizens. And you can't do that in school because you need the freedom of not being forced to go to class and freedom from your parents too.
I sympathize with this view. When I was young (and foolish), I was really upset at how university education was being commoditized to teach job skills when really it should (in my opinion) follow the Classical Greek model of education designed to better a person -- the word for school also means "leisure". I also bemoaned the lack of intellectual curiosity and anti-intellectual atmosphere in universities, even elite universities.
But over time, I realized that this model of a university where you go and find yourself or discover the truth or become an enlightened person was fundamentally impossible as a method of national policy.
It is an indulgence for the elite which doesn't scale to 70% of the population, most of whom have zero desire to become intellectuals and are going to school so that they can have job skills. They need job skills. Why would we make them take out huge loans or waste a key portion of their lives role playing as intellectuals?
Moreover, it's really hard to teach young people insight about life because most of us are complete fools when we are young and all we get is the feeling of having deep insight into things, we don't really get that insight except by _doing_, whether that means engaging directly with the world via travel or talking to people outside our bubble, reading things that challenge us, experience life by having kids or watching a relative die, or whether that means doing on the job -- secluding yourself into a dream world on a walled off campus with a strictly controlled idealized environment is an indulgence that does not actually make you a more knowledgeable person.
In terms of an elite school offering superior results, that is always easy to do if you are selective. It's trivial to create a high school with much superior results than the average high school if you can pick out good students. The hard thing to do is to scale that to a national policy for everyone.
So if this secluded campus model of the university doesn't promote your intellectual life and it doesn't give you job skills, then why are we doing it?
There is a reason why the original schools were basically theological training institutions and later became finishing schools for the wealthy. That model of university education was always a type of bubble, but at least in the past, people were sent to the bubble because they were going to live in that bubble for the rest of their lives so the university was preparing them for their future life, either in a monastery or in elite circles where employment was considered a dirty word.
You wouldn't, like you weren't paying to do your military service.
> engaging directly with the world via travel or talking to people outside our bubble
A mandatory year mixing all social classes is, by definition, "bubble-popping". In fact this still happens today, when young people are forced to leave their home town they lived all their life in in order to go to the university.
Also, nothing is preventing a university from having some practical workshops... (I know a lot of people that got their truck-driving license during their military service) and a big university should be able to have some much more expensive training machinery than a small school.
P.S.: Oliv(i)er Faron is far from being young and foolish...
> You wouldn't, like you weren't paying to do your military service.
Who do you think pays for military service if not the people? Martians? What is the difference between generation X paying for generation X+1's education, spending g% more than what was paid for their own education, and generation X taking out a loan to pay for their education at a rate of r? The only thing that matters is whether r > g, the growth rate of the price of education. If r > g, then a direct transfer is slightly more efficient. If r < g, then a loan is more efficient. In this case, g is astronomically high. Yet you favor the more inefficient approach, because it hides the fact that most money spent on tertiary education is a waste, and you want this waste transferred to the old rather than kept by the young.
> engaging directly with the world via travel or talking to people outside our bubble
A mandatory year mixing all social classes is, by definition, "bubble-popping".
Ahh, yes, those isolated campuses with safe spaces and psychological violence counselors -- a true bubble popping experience.
> The facts don't support this claim. U.S. government spending on tertiary education is 0.91% of GDP compared to Germany's 1.0% and Japan's 0.45%
US voters aren’t comparing taxes with Japan and Germany. They’re voting between politician A who says they will lower taxes, and does it by removing funding for higher education or politician B, who does provide higher education and hence has to collect higher taxes and politician A. Politician A can get away with this by claiming they still support students by providing government loans or government guaranteed private loans or whatever, but they don’t have to account for it in the same way politician B does.
I agree with all of your points, and I far prefer the German model too. But American voters seem to love debt, and low taxes, and rarely is a thought given to the future.
Maybe American voters don't want to pay more for college education because they know how much it costs, and they feel they are already paying enough?
I think they are correct.
Reforming higher education means cutting spending first and foremost.
Shut down half the universities, lay off 1/3 of the staff in the rest, seize the endowments, close all the sports stadiums, fire most of the admins, force students to finish in 3 years, and then take the pile of money we are already spending on education and make that be the full tuition.
Voters concerned about high taxes would benefit from this, as would the top 50% of students. The bottom 50% of University students should be diverted to 2 year long trade schools, which can be built on the ruins of the shutdown universities, but staffed with craftsmen rather than professors. Industry can pay for 1/3 of it, students can pay for 1/3, and taxpayers can pay for the other third of the trade schools.
It's just one proposal, but generally trade school is much shorter and is usually a paid apprenticeship situation, or turns into one very quickly. If there is no apprenticeship, then sure can make it like Unis.
The tone is draconian because you have a whole class of people ripping students off, ripping taxpayers off, providing very little value, and yet being extremely sanctimonious about why more spending is needed. The hypocrisy and amorality of the higher education industry in the US is stunning, so a draconian approach is called for.
I whole-heartedly agree. But it's politically untenable, and not just because of unions and sports fans.
Any limit to university education in the US butts up with class (read: race) and inequality issues. I would love to close all of the over-priced and educationally dubious for-profit institutions. But any semblance that we are limiting educational attainment to the educational-haves is unacceptable.
The market for what HNers regard as an education (4-year degrees from established public or private universities) is really only like half of the post-secondary education market.
If you offer Johnny $20,000 to attend Purdue, you have to give everyone $20,000, regardless of their school-choice, aptitude, likelihood to graduate, or future income projections. To do so otherwise puts society in the unfortunate position of deciding who gets to pursue the American Dream.
> Reforming higher education means cutting spending first and foremost.
This has already occurred and continues to be cut further. What also happened however, is the legislature promised lenders that taxpayers would pay for all student loans. Of course this doesn’t get accounted in cash flow, because you can just assume more people will pay back their loans than actually will.
So now you have a situation where a lender can make a loan of unlimited amount of money with no risk to the lender, a borrower who knows nothing about money but has infinite ability to borrow, and a seller (schools) that get less money from taxpayers, but now can fight for the gobs of money that the students (who know nothing) have control of spending.
Hence unnecessary stadiums, recreational centers, buildings, admin, etc.
I don't think "reducing taxpayer funding" is the 'cutting spending' the parent comment meant. I think they meant actual reduction of admin, buildings, rec centers, etc.
Agreed. I think it is going away, or at least I can't imagine anyone being looked down upon if they say they are a carpenter, plumber, electrician, or mechanic. And nowadays these will make more money than your average university graduate.
I'm too lazy to do anything but a cursory search, but it looks like it breaks down like this for higher education spending, according to a 2015 report:
Federal: $75.6 billion
State: $72.7 billion
Local: $9.2 billion
Although the funding between State and Federal are similar, the way those funds are spent may be different:
"The federal government mostly provides financial assistance to individual students and funds specific research projects, while states typically fund the general operations of public institutions, with smaller amounts appropriated for research and financial aid."
The facts don't support this claim. U.S. government spending on tertiary education is 0.91% of GDP compared to Germany's 1.0% and Japan's 0.45% (source: https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-educati...)
Rather, university education in the U.S., like healthcare, is insanely expensive compared to other countries. Why is that?
1. Non-selective. We admit 70% of high school graduates to University whereas in Germany they admit 1/3.
2. Too long/unfocused. University education can last 5-6 years in the US for a bachelors, whereas in Germany it is limited to 3 years. You don't get to drift around as "undecided" and change your major, you apply to the school with a specific major. You don't get a lot of choice as to your electives and follow a pre-planned course of study (for the most part).
3. Too many frills. European schools don't have massive sports stadiums, athletic departments, or other amenities similar to US universities.
4. Too much staff. Our universities are massively overstaffed with everything from diversity officers to football coaches to teams of counselors.
Put this all together, and you have a very expensive, inefficient, gold-plated system focused on catering to student whims rather than to taxpayer efficiency. Of course tax payers don't want to pay for it -- why should they? If you want European style funding of universities, you need European-style spending levels and rigor. If you want an experience that is half as selective, takes twice as long, and offers absurd amenities that have nothing to do with university education, then you are going to have to pay for that out of your own pocket rather than asking for taxpayers to provide this experience for you.
The good news is that you can find relatively inexpensive higher education in the U.S. if you are a good student and are willing to attend community college for the first two years and a local state school for the rest. If you are good enough to be admitted to University in Europe, then in the U.S. you should be able to get a scholarship. Of course most US university students would never be admitted to University in Europe in the first place -- so having an option to pay a lot to go might be better than not having an option at all. But I suspect that we would be better off adopting a German style trade school system to absorb 50% of high school graduates as well as a more rigorous high school system, but that would require adoption of tracking and letting most students know that they are not going to be on the university track. In that type of environment, sure, taxpayers would be willing to fund the enterprise since they would only be spending 10% more than they are spending now to match German-level of tertiary education spending.