A sensible system would be one like Brazil's (and possibly other countries): free education at public universities for those who qualify on the stringent entrance exams along with a system of private universities for those who don't make it and can pay for it.
This would allow all deserving students a high quality, free education while limiting the amount of waste and degree inflation that would result from a completely free university system.
With the caveat that public elementary education in Brazil is very bad, so the people who are able to qualify on those exams are the people who come from families who could afford private schools at the elementary level.
So in essence, it's a system that's geared towards keeping the rich educated and the poor uneducated, by using a slight Catch-22.
Of course YMMV, and it often does, Brazil is huge and there are exceptions, but what I've laid out is what most commonly happens.
In the past few years though, the Government has built programs whose goal is to increase the amount of poor people who get educated, either by subsidizing the cost with tax money in private universities (Gasp! Socialism! :P) or by affirmative action with a quota system in public universities.
This brings about worries of its own, such as "Will people who are granted access to well-ranked Universities based primarily on their low income be able to actually follow through with the course?", for example, but overall the situation is an improvement.
The USA's education system of student debt is also addressing another important problem - quality leakage to a foreign country. Think about it, Brazil (or any other country with a similar system) invests heavily in training its bright people for free, and afterwards it just looses them to some high bid foreign employer and the country's education investment gets counted as waste. USA on the other hand, puts the yoke on its promising younglings early on, so regardless of the outcome, the country gets a profit out of them (and in a capitalist frame of thought that's what does mater the most). Clever, isn't it?
A sensible system would be one like Brazil's (and possibly other countries): free education at public universities for those who qualify on the stringent entrance exams along with a system of private universities for those who don't make it and can pay for it.
California used to have a multitier system of tuition-free higher-education (two tiers of tuition-free public university, both selective but one moreso than the other, plus the community college system) along with private universities, so it worked somewhat like that, but that eroded over time.
The political culture in the United States would attack that system as being unfair to the poor and minorities that ostensibly received a lesser education than their middle- and upper-class cohorts.
When something like that existed in California, that wasn't the thing that destroyed it, rather, it was funding pressure from anti-tax crusaders.
The kind of people who advocate for fairness for the poor and minorities are more likely to advocate for moves back toward that system rather than away from it.
Comments
A sensible system would be one like Brazil's (and possibly other countries): free education at public universities for those who qualify on the stringent entrance exams along with a system of private universities for those who don't make it and can pay for it.
This would allow all deserving students a high quality, free education while limiting the amount of waste and degree inflation that would result from a completely free university system.
With the caveat that public elementary education in Brazil is very bad, so the people who are able to qualify on those exams are the people who come from families who could afford private schools at the elementary level.
So in essence, it's a system that's geared towards keeping the rich educated and the poor uneducated, by using a slight Catch-22.
Of course YMMV, and it often does, Brazil is huge and there are exceptions, but what I've laid out is what most commonly happens.
In the past few years though, the Government has built programs whose goal is to increase the amount of poor people who get educated, either by subsidizing the cost with tax money in private universities (Gasp! Socialism! :P) or by affirmative action with a quota system in public universities.
This brings about worries of its own, such as "Will people who are granted access to well-ranked Universities based primarily on their low income be able to actually follow through with the course?", for example, but overall the situation is an improvement.
The USA's education system of student debt is also addressing another important problem - quality leakage to a foreign country. Think about it, Brazil (or any other country with a similar system) invests heavily in training its bright people for free, and afterwards it just looses them to some high bid foreign employer and the country's education investment gets counted as waste. USA on the other hand, puts the yoke on its promising younglings early on, so regardless of the outcome, the country gets a profit out of them (and in a capitalist frame of thought that's what does mater the most). Clever, isn't it?
California used to have a multitier system of tuition-free higher-education (two tiers of tuition-free public university, both selective but one moreso than the other, plus the community college system) along with private universities, so it worked somewhat like that, but that eroded over time.
The political culture in the United States would attack that system as being unfair to the poor and minorities that ostensibly received a lesser education than their middle- and upper-class cohorts.
When something like that existed in California, that wasn't the thing that destroyed it, rather, it was funding pressure from anti-tax crusaders.
The kind of people who advocate for fairness for the poor and minorities are more likely to advocate for moves back toward that system rather than away from it.