As these things go, the plan was eroded over time, with the (in)famous Proposition 13 of 1978 dealing a big blow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...
What saddens me is that grand (and simple) plan "free education for all" gets watered down and chipped away to "free education for those who have money or connections" and later attempts to shore it up offten amount to "free education for $special_group". While I don't deny $special_group should get free education, what gets me is all the special-pleading going on.
In OOM programming terms, it's like we had a universal principle which was easy to implement, and this has now been replaced by a bunch of switch/case statements...
Thankfully not all of them are trying to apply specifically to UCLA or even in state, but the numbers are staggering.
and so has the tax base and # of teachers. This is a non-issue. Society scales.
> and high school graduation rates have risen signifigantly (which is of course good).
Not necessarily : see my comment below.
And I'm equally unsure if taxes have tripled, between increasing poverty on the bottom and more and more tax evasion on top.
Pretty sure, yes. Why do you doubt it?
> some services are social goods and should be treated as such
I'm not disputing that. I'm just taking issue with the marketing strategy. I don't like selling it as "free education" because that's a lie, and I don't like lying because it catches up with you eventually. I think it should be called what it is: government-subsidized education. (I also think it should be means-tested. I see no reason for society to pick up the tab for rich people's kids.)
OTOH, it is a much cooler slogan than 'education paid by society at large :)
That is far from clear. There are crazy people on the left just like there are crazy people on the right, and I think some of them really don't understand how the world actually works, and that you really can somehow magically make education "free for everyone".
Even if it's not true, it provides ammunition for the opposition to say that it's true. One way or another, I think using misleading terminology is generally not a net win.
Do you think that definition is bad? If so, maybe you'll catch more nibbles by trying to engage in a dialog?
If capacity at existing colleges is the problem, we could start new ones.
We all know what is meant by "free" in this context, and there's no point in acting obtuse about it except to argue in bad faith.
Prop 13’s impact on the political economy, empowering comfortable boomers, is probably as bad as its impacts on the budget.
Which happens to be the metric that really matters.
When leftists say that something like public healthcare would be literally free what they mean is that the net cost compared to the alternative is null or negative, not literally that nothing is being spent.
If you want to give me a link of someone who literally thinks that free college means that no one has to pay anything for the college itself or it's staff, I'm willing to take a look. Otherwise, it's just an argument that the net cost to society is negligible or negative, which is a valid use of the word too.
- universities wasting massive amounts of money on things that have nothing to do with academics, such as sports programs, stadiums, etc.
- because they can, due to people getting ridiculous loans to pay the ridiculous tuition cost.
So all that would have to be done there is ban them from charging these ridiculous fees. Is that not it?
Of course, not many people have the concept of money at the government scale either. What does $75B to Ukraine really mean?
I've seen a lot of terms used for social services: subsidized, covered, available by grant, available to those who qualify.
But I don't always see those social services tossing around the word "free".
Sure, sometimes there are "free haircuts for the homeless" or "free medical services for the needy", or "free help to apply for benefits", but generally in the context of entitlements, we're not freely bandying this word around.
It doesn’t matter to me if these sports generate more revenue than it costs. It is a distraction that we don’t need. If people want to participate in spectator sport, there are other places for it.
My justification is the same as that Google uses to kill projects. There might be a project at Google that makes a hundred million dollars of “pure profit”. However, if it takes even equivalent of a month of time and attention of the executive leadership team and the board every year, it is decidedly not worth doing and must be scrapped.
Similarly, it doesn’t matter to me how much money sports and other such distractions make. If it takes time and attention of the management and or the board of regents, it must be scrapped. Educational institutions exist for education. Cut it all out!
It's not the only way we refer to these things, but it's an accepted one.
>"Free education" really means education paid for by society at large rather than students. I'm not saying that's a bad idea. It isn't. In fact, it's a really good idea.
Like, he's no longer allowed to be a social democrat if he understands bsaic economics? Why am I not surprised?
> some services are social goods and should be treated as such,
Perhaps. But how is higher education that? It's true that not as many people as you would like have 4 year degrees, but many do, and those people serve me overpriced coffees while whining about unionization.
Where is the social good in their degrees? Like, even if they had gotten those for free and there was no student debt, how did their degrees help either society at large, or them personally?
It is apparently very easy for this to not be a social good.
The tax base and the number of higher education instructors may indeed have tripled. I'd have to check. But that would only be enough if you were going to teach the same fraction as went to college in 1960. What was that, 10 or 15%?
So we'd need something like a x30 increase in teachers. And even more in tax base (since we're building more campuses or enlarging the existing, not merely funding the existing ones).
Looks like it was about 38b https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4432
That link also has the allocations for that 38b. You can get 5Gb fiber in my neighborhood now. Some of that is probably due to this budget for instance.
It works great at the ballot box too! "Vote now for your free stuff! Everybody gets more free stuff when they vote for me! Support the bill for free stuff!" Because if you called it "using other people's money", then the Ghost of Margaret Thatcher would arise and invade Puerto Rico.
While you're voting, consider whether you're in that hacker demographic that gets a chuckle out of the meme that says "The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer."
it's kinda crazy that poorer countries than ours seem to get the pony.
I disagree with you, but I'm not discussing your value judgement, I'm discussing whether "free" is widely understood to mean taxpayer funded.
It is also understood that the source of funding for institutions which offer free services is taxes, fees, and levies from the general population. Regardless of what MMT proponents imagine, costs will eventually be repaid by resources, labor, or war.
I find it intellectually dishonest to advocate for “free” services without acknowledging how those services are funded. It does seem more of the population is interested in immediate gratification regardless of long term costs (see deficit spending, consumer debt, etc.), but that doesn’t make the cost disappear because it is ignored. It’s no different than suggesting because birds fly, they must not be affected by gravity.
Don't forget administrative bloat.
In the case of covered education for foster kids, I’m conflicted. I’m in favor of providing anyone placed in the foster care system resources to offset their hardship. I would support non-profits that showed they could efficiently direct funding to programs to help foster kids go to college. I would wager there is research that shows positive economic and social impact by sending foster kids to college that outweighs the cost and significantly reduces the risk of foster to prison. But that’s my choice and don’t think everyone else should be forced to have the same convictions.
While not perfect, Arizona exposes this somewhat by offering tax credits for contributions to non-profits in certain categories (aid for working poor, tuition assistance, foster/adoption, public schools). I’m still forced to cover the cost of social programs, but minimally I get have some agency in choosing organizations that align with my philosophy in those domains and aren’t kicking back a slice of that money to politicians.
California hasn’t solved the issue because some percentage of residents or other interest groups don’t want to solve the issue and have had the political means to block attempts at resolution.
It can be an institution integrated into a city.
You could call all of these 'education' but the usual and implicit image of education in people's minds is lectures and tutoring sessions so it's worth highlighting these other aspects. All of these are present in universities around the world in varying degrees.
I have no idea how they handle things in say China, but at least here it’s quite obvious that the point of university is more or less to prepare students for life in general rather than just get educated. Education is of course the grand goal and at least here in Finland universities get some significant amount of money from the government for each graduating student, but your first sentence is still dishonest argumentation at best.
Besides, the GP is talking total nonsense in general. Everyone I know outside the US looks up to your college sports scene in admiration since it looks like an awful lot of fulfilment and fun on top of studies and produces a massive amount of successful athletes in all kinds of sports. We’re envious of it, nothing more. Your country is and has been home to the most innovations and set a positive example to the rest of the world for decades and decades now, and frankly saying otherwise is just silly.
Somewhat unrelated, but several states have seen unexpected growth since that time period
Kind of hard to believe, but in 1950 Florida and Kentucky had about the same population. Since then Florida has 8x'ed (I think because of modern AC). Other states (especially in the south and southwest) have seen similar levels of growth to CA. I don't see how the problem you mentioned is specific to California
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_census
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/27/8854037/us-population-history-...
These are all things that happen in universities, but they are also all things that young people have the opportunity to do outside of university.
OTOH, that in itself shows that the increased tuition hasn't actually kept people from going to college.
Second, according to Finnish law,
> The mission of the universities is to promote independent academic research as well as academic and artistic education, to provide research-based higher education and to educate students to serve their country and humanity at large.
It has been argued that getting involved in volunteer activities is part of the education. Participating in college sports would qualify, while watching them and supporting your team would not.
I don't think that's true? It's just that they're not a huge public thing, televised, random locals watching live, with people attending the 'college' purely to play for the team, studying as a technicality. The only people involved, generally, are those playing (self-organised).
I played ice hockey in the UK university league (which was at the time in the EU, but I'm not nitpicking that point) and the team occasionally travelled abroad (I went to Eindhoven, NL) to play other university teams in Europe. (And get absolutely thrashed: hockey's bigger in much of Europe, especially colder countries, than it is in the UK, so they were the cream of a big pool of talent, while we were ..scraping a team together from interested parties is only slightly an exaggeration.)
College sports aren't exactly an export like oil or software.
I know what I am saying. The whole point is spiraling costs and tragedy of the commons. Colleges and universities must keep spending on spectator sports because otherwise you can’t pull students away from other colleges and universities that do the same. The whole point of my comment is to make college accessible and affordable. You can’t just say “don’t look up”. Something has to change.
This is objectively false for the small college I went to… in any case, you ignored my whole comment, even if it does make money, I don’t want it because this money corrupts beyond just the one university. It changes expectation for all colleges and universities. Now my NCAA division 3 college has to go to donors and beg for flood lights for the football stadium. This is time the UA people could spend on begging for dorms or chemistry lab equipments.
The old adage comes to mind: "you loved your college years because you lived in a socialized infrastructure with walkable neighborhoods and the opportunities for spontaneously meeting old friends and new people alike".
Definately, debating, fencing and politics of student councill all belong in university.
But is a highly-commercial sport appropriate.
My understanding is that these studenta do sport instead of studying. They basically get a degree instead of cash compensation. This seems both corrupting education and exploiting the students.
If you think that's okay, why is this approach not applied to Formula Student?
It has engineering students build racecars and compete. If a graduate in mechanical engineering buildz a winning racecar, thats a hood indicator of conpetence. A winner in football is an indicator of.. anything?
Same goes for computer science and like every humanities degree - you can become an autodidact in any subject that does not require expebsive equiment and facilities.
On the contrary, > 60% of most people's lifelong friends consist of people they met at school or university. That suggests we are not very good at connecting eith random people we meet on the street.
This is the real reason manufacturing is leaving the West, not regulation and not evil plan by China. This is also the real reason for culture of thowing away things and not repairing -> a new dishwasher costs £300, but a mechanic needs to charge £100 an hour to pay rent.
If you rent is 50% of your income, the rent is actuslly 75% of your income -> because when you pay for anything, say get a plumber, 50% of your money goes to pay the plumber's rent. If, hypothetically, rents were zero, the plumber would cost twice less. You would have 4 times more money.
Many compalins ignore the costs of missing these services.
We have 'free' firefighters because entire cities used to burn to the ground. That's very expensive to rebuild.
We have 'free' sanitation becauae The Black Death did more economic damage than both world wars combined.
We have free school education because having a population that can't read and write is economically ruinous. And politically ruinous - illiterate people can vote, join cults, maybe they support the inquisition and burning witches at the stake. We've been thought that.
No-one i ever met believes we should go back to the times where majority couldn't read and write becauae parents could not afford school. Some just believe that education stops at an arbitrary age.
I disagree with your opinion in the third paragraph, but I think we can agree to disagree.
So if we're going to discuss the economic realities of government subsidies, we should go a bit further than "things cost money," because that's obvious and simplistic.
*Edit: Just want to add that the tax debate is indeed worth having. My point is only that the justification for subsidies is grounded in econ principles, not just the whims of the public.
You got lucky. My alma mater needed to pay for similar, so they added new line items to every student's tuition.
I never thought something like that would be possible for me. It ended up being fairly easy. Moving to California radically changed my life for the better.
"Taxpayer funded" is a gross oversimplification, for any sort of government entitlement and college funding alike.
But anyway, I have seen students in college who were sent there by their employer. They work full-time, have families with young children, and they were expected to pick up several credit-hours to upskill. You've never seen a bunch of sleepier guys. A lot of people, sent by their employer picking up the tab, don't wanna be there, and it shows. They're really disengaged with the class, and that frustrates classmates and professor alike.
Then there's students whose parents paid for it, and family expectations on them finishing college so they get a "real job", or even support the parents and buy them a nice house soon.
Students who work their way through school adopt another distinct attitude. They will get tired too, but they make every credit-hour count. It's their own money and their own blood, sweat, and tears that bring them to the finish line.
There are students who apply for scholarships and get through college that way. There's all sorts of funding for scholarships: corporate sponsors, non-profits, churches, community-based organizations, philanthropic foundations. Someone came to speak at the fraternity meeting and she said she'd been awarded six million dollars in scholarships. I was unsure how you'd spend all that at a community college, but hey?
People who are spending, or supported by, other people's money spend it differently than if it were their own money in their own bank account with them watching the bills and transactions. The incentives are different. The risk/reward calculation is different. That's how it goes.
The Jarvis Foundation promoted it as a cost containment measure after the measure had been qualified for the ballot.
(tldr - in which I conclude that we agree on the goal but disagree on “which was easy to implement”, after thinking through my own educational / economical history at some length ;))
I benefited from:
* a nearly free and (luckily) high quality school education from kindergarten through 12th grade - most schools were not that great in my time, I lucked out (with parents who strived / persisted until they got me into the right one) * a nearly free but terrible education for my bachelors in engineering in India * a largely discounted and excellent post-graduate education in the US, paid for by my work as a research assistant, which I had to compete for, and that paid the equivalent of $375/month after taxes for working 20 hours a week with a full course load from which I paid my living expenses (in the early oughts - so i was poor :)), but came with a tuition waiver.
Here’s how it has led me to approach this subject:
* I definitely agree that the ideal of nearly free education for everyone that wants it is the right one for a richer society like America to strive for, but subject to some basic rules(eg maintain non-abysmal grades that reflect at least basic effort)
* Free just means someone else is paying for it - and that has its limits. In a free / subsidized college world, major states in India had (have?) so few engineering colleges that if you got less than 99%, you couldn’t study technology - at all! Barring a stroke of luck (family moving to another state where I at least got into a pretty bad engineering college) , I would have had to study economics instead of engineering.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/delhi-uni...
* Around the time of the article above (maybe a few years before) India started allowing private colleges to charge more. This has made education a lot more expensive in India on average, although I believe a similar number of “free seats” still exist, but the number of “seats” to study popular fields has gone up by on order of magnitude, and that has enabled a LOT more people to study what they want, but incomes have grown a lot too for white collar workers. For many (not all) fields, folks are able to take a loan and pay it back.
* If, for instance, the US government paid for just “degree granting post-secondary institutions” expenses, it would instantly become the #2 budget category just below social security and above health, medicare, “income security” and defense.
* It seems that 65% of US adults over 25 do not have a bachelors degree. It seems likely many of them will not support using their tax dollars to create a new #2 budget liability - despite the “chicken-or-egg” dynamic - that if the education was free, many of them would have a degree, and might support it.