Not really. The public Universities are largely funded from federal and state income taxes. The bottom 50% of earners pays 3.1% of the federal income tax. 36% of the federal budget comes from payroll taxes, which are not progressive, but are largely targeted for social security and medicare are partially paid for by employers and are still largely proportional to income. By and large, the poor are receiving money from the non-poor for their education and would continue to do so under a free college plan.
I get that a lot of poor kids don’t go to college and wouldn’t even under a free college plan, but it’s not nearly enough to make it true that the poor are subsidizing the rich. I don’t think so anyway.
And, geez, this argument can be made for most public services.
i don’t know what you think “rich” is, but it’s not actually that many people.
education is a regressive tax on the poor already. it takes a lot of tax revenue to support it, and financial pressures mean those outside top quintiles are foregoing college, which is how they would move up socially
Also, I would be quite surprised if a study of free college wouldn’t show that in the long run it increases government revenue and was not anyone subsidizing anyone else, but a profitable investment for society.
If an argument can be made that a public service is redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich, then yeah, that public service needs to be looked at too. Especially if its one that is such a huge expense and benifit.
Im posting before googling. But the studies i read in uni 15 years ago suggested otherwise.
Education always has a public benifit. But as you move from primary to secondary to tertiary, the social benefits become outweighed by both the costs and private benifit.
Im as guilty as everyone else by not posting links or sources, but theres a whole academic field looking at exactly these questions. We dont need to guess.
Why not cancel debt?
Bad politics, everyone that doesn’t have student debt gets to pay for your education while you reap the rewards.
Is it really a burden?
It should be +ev or it was a bad investment you shouldn’t have made.
Societal blight?
BTW there is no “CANCEL” debt, you are just proposing transferring personal debt to the SOCIETY as a whole.
I agree that higher education should be free.
I think free college is good politics.
I think debt “forgiveness” is bad politics when the pool being forgiven is much smaller than the pool not.
Definitely need to fuck up an entire generation because 17 year olds didn’t make the correct cost/benefit analysis! It’s totally their fault for being such selfish assholes that they believed the hype that a lifetime of crushing higher education debt was worth it and necessary.
By continuously repeating its a “tax on the poor for the rich” despite the poor paying minimal taxes it’s very clear you really don’t get American culture nor the benefits of having public services for all that many countries have rather than this means tested/bureaucratic bullshit we have on the few public benefits we have in America.
In practice, you don’t just get to tax the rich and give it all to the poor. Unless the spoils from the rich are distributed throughout society, the rich/conservatives will win their ultimate political goal of drowning government in a bathtub and the poor get nothing.
The “it’s a bad investment you decided to make now you have to pay for it” argument is literally only ever made by people whose rich parents paid for their education or people who didn’t go to college. Just because they weren’t pressured by every adult in their life (parents, teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, etc) to take on crushing debt to obtain a degree, they think they made a smart decision while the rest of the teenagers were stupid.
Show me one person who as a 17 year old high school student with aspirations of a college education, and who has been fed the notion that college is a must, who said “no, I don’t believe it is a wise decision for me to go to college due to the inflated costs that will burden me for decades to come.” You can’t.
In my family people did things like take the first two years at community college and then transfer credits to a good state college. My dad helped pay, which is help beyond what some families can provide, but most of my brothers and sisters also made prudent decisions and didn’t decide to finance expensive private schools. [I obtained my BS and MS years later as an adult, with some help from work (~50%) on my BS, and student loans to pay for my MS.]
When some people say bad decisions, some of them are not saying going to college was a bad decision necessarily. But there are ways to do it prudently even now without ending up $100k in debt. (And I’m not saying I couldn’t be convinced to support forgiving loans. I would much rather spend our resources on that than on fighting more wars and subsidizing more profits for private businesses.)
My major concern about forgiving student debt is the MASSIVE amount of grievances it would cause with the non college educated which we need to start winning. Like yes those people got fucked, yes it would be massive stimulus to the economy, but broke working class people would be furious if college educated people got a huge windfall that they’ll be helping pay for while they didn’t get shit. You need to give working class people something too or it’s gonna be politically pretty ugly.
So in a vacuum I’m for it, but when you consider the politics of it I’m much more worried. Sadly dems got the college educated demographic locked up, but they’re a small portion of the population.
If dems can take the senate and do another huge relief bill to the working class, that would be a great time to do it. That way everyone gets something and there isn’t some massive grievance that would be super easy for the right to exploit.
If they don’t take the senate and its clear nobody is going to get shit for at least 2 years, then it becomes dicey.
I must be mistaken, it seems like most posters here think it was not worth it.
I assumed that it was worth it. Maybe overpriced etc., but still massively +ev.
Like everything else,the system needs reforming.
The calculation for whether it is +EV or not has changed from 30+ years ago. Hell it’s pretty different compared to 20 years ago, the increase in costs has been pretty high compared to wages.
The below is from last year but shows the average salary out of college dropping for many fields compared to the year before. So you expect to make less while college, rent, and other costs keep rising, it seems like it’s not so clear that it’ll always be +EV for everyone.
Yep, also the neoliberal way. These sick administrative fucks running these “non-profits” see that students are gaining tremendous “surplus value” from attending these non-profit universities and decide to steal it from them. And 90% of them would swear up and down that they are “liberal.”
If you paid it off 30 years ago then you had way way way less than people graduating today have. Working while attending college now doesn’t even come close to paying for college.
I don’t think a liberal arts education is all that useful for most people and that the trade school/liberal arts/professional degree distinctions all fail to address a real need from higher education. There should be a couple semesters of free (and mandatory) education in personal finance, critical thinking, media literacy, interpersonal relationships, and similar critical life skills that most people never receive any formal instruction in at all. That would do so much more for the development of an educated society.
These things are not antithetical to a liberal arts education. If anything, all higher education should start with a baseline in liberal arts then specialize from there.