The Value and Cost of Higher Education

I am realizing that I am a huge fan of growth and learning, but not necessarily of education.  Formal education can be good, but only to a point, and it always comes at a cost.  The question to ask is: at what point does the benefit cease to justify the cost.  Most any knowledge that can be acquired can be useful in some form, but some is more valuable than others.  Basic education should be widely applicable to daily life, and to develop critical thinking and analysis skills.

But beyond that, I do not think that education is inherently valuable.  If learned for a reason, anything can be valuable.  But the same things learned for their own sake are not inherently useful or valuable.  I am all for someone pursuing a degree if they feel called to be a lawyer or a doctor.  But if they are just going to college of grad school because they aren't sure what else to do, that isn't necessarily good.

There is a debate about how much the government should be subsidizing higher education.  On the one side, there are those who think that the government should help pay for college costs, because an educated population is good for society as a whole.  On the other side are people who think that people should pay for the costs of their own education, because they are the ones who stand to benefit the most from that opportunity.  And they are the ones who have to be responsible to put in the effort to actually succeed and learn in that environment.

I usually favor independent responsibility, and less government intrusion in the lives of its citizens, so I am not in favor of government funding, and therefore control, in education.  But I have been seeing some articles pointing out how Europe has successfully publicly funded their University systems.  And that caused me to wonder: if they have succeeded to do that, why can't we?  That doesn't seem like such a bad thing to do, instead of hordes of graduates with excessive debts flooding into the job market.  What is wrong with that idea?

I also saw another article comparing foreign exchange students to Americans in our universities.  The basic premise was that immigrants were seen as too busy studying to have any fun, and Americans were too busy drinking and partying to do any studying.  So I found myself wondering, how do we solve that problem.  And that is when some conversations I had with foreign students in college began to come to mind.

They had explained that they qualified and were chosen for the foreign exchange program, the same way they were selected to attend public university.  They had to pass certain tests in high school that determined if they would be given a spot at university, and if not they were not allowed to advance in their education.

In America, as a free country, we want people to have freedom and options.  That means that the government doesn't choose who is allowed to attend university, but to increase those potential options, we currently subsidize that option, with loans and grants.  So most individuals have the freedom to attend college, with fewer financial limits than would be natural.

So what if we copied a different aspect of the European system, and tied government financial assistance to ongoing academic performance?  Suddenly the issue of the average American college student wasting their time drinking and partying would be solved.  Some would wise up and work harder, and the others would be removed, where they could do their partying and drinking after they get off work from doing something loosely productive instead of pretending to learn.  Our tax dollars would get a much better return on investment, with those we do pay for actually learning more, for the benefit of society.  With fewer college graduates, who actually learned something in school, a degree would actually be meaningful in getting a good job.  And that would incentivize the whole system, to encourage it to improve, instead of devolve into the current mess.

Now there are some students who can afford to pay for their education without government assistance, and in a free country they shouldn't necessarily be excluded the opportunity.  And they may be ones who are partying it up, but that is less likely when they are spending their own money on the classes they are skipping.  And even if they aren't learning, they are paying into the system, so their irresponsible behavior is no more of a burden on the system than if they weren't there at all.

So we find that as usual, irresponsible government spending with no accountability is not only wasteful, but leads to much larger problems than they were originally intended to solve.  But the process of changing it will be very unpopular due to the fact that Americans don't understand the difference between the right to freedom of access to something, and deserving to have it blindly provided to them free of charge.