As long as you let universities act like for-profit businesses, their profits will be the only thing they optimize for.
Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance system might tick up inflation.
Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
Where is the humanity? Of course some extreme of inflation is bad, and of course we want people to be employable. But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
(And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech about the need for H1B).
Also if you are being $ focused then offer it where there is ROI: STEM, medicine (allow more doctors too).
Education doesn't lose its value if it is free. Does food and water? Shelter?
Unless people are just tuning out of their degree and it is just a social thing. In which deal with that specific problem.
There are more low-income people in private universities (with private or private/public loans) than in public universities.
I don't know the ins and outs of the UK education system, but I have to assume the facilities and employees are still paid for.
> Does food and water? Shelter?
If everyone had access to it for free? Absolutely! I wouldn't work as a farmer or build houses if no one had to pay for those products. Value, or price in this context, is only really feasible for scarce assets. If something is seemingly unlimited and freely available it will have no (financial) value.
Well yes, I can talk to two different points when the context is different. A good conversation isn't just people shouting their personal opinions, its people playing off of the discussion at hand and considering different angles.
> Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
That's actually not what I was saying, I may have phrased it poorly. I did not mean that I worry about anyone getting educated. I was simply trying to point out that a degree has much less value when anyone can get it, like that's because it is free as is the topic here.
In the other thread I wasn't actually concerned about inflation personally, only pointing out that inflation will go up if a large amount of student debt is made to just disappear. I was raising that as a prediction with high likelihood, personally I have opinions on the underlying approach but I don't really have dog in the fight either.
> But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
What artificial scarcity are you talking about here?
I'm not trying to say we need artificial scarcity, university should be a market like any other product or service.
Personally I tend to go even further away from most when it comes to scarcity in the job market too - I'd rather have open borders than immigration systems that limit how many people can come here and compete for jobs.
Does health insurance also lose its value when anyone can get it for free?
People get free insurance but hospitals get fixed amounts of cash allowing them to admit fixed amount of patients
In this scenario the answer is yes, it loses some value. Still much better system than private care in US
Of course if you're an ignorant right wing anti-intellectual climate change and evolution denying religious fanatic, the idea of everyone having a Harvard degree is existentially terrifying for other reasons that it losing a little bit of value.
Whats a truly competitive market place where all competitors, broadly speaking, are playing on the same playing field and the best business wins?
There's been nothing but waves of consolidation across nearly all industries for the last 40 years. Competition is scarce, it seems.
Why take that at face value? Its generally used for wage suppression[0][1] by big companies (not only in tech) and due to how its structured, creates an unhealthy power balance between employers and H1B employees
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-024-05823-8
[1]: https://www.paularnesen.com/blog/the-h-1b-visa-corporate-ame...
Also part of this is making education better bang for buck.
You can say who's gonna pay for it for everything. Defense and meddling in world affairs is a big cost too.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing, if most people want it that way I don't see the problem. But it isn't free.
Though yes, financially health insurance also has no monetary value when anyone can get it for free. You can't assign a price to it and anyone in the health insurance business is entirely at the whims of what the government is willing to pay them to provide a service deemed essential enough to subsidize the entire cost of the product.
Is it your opinion that Harvard could provide the same quality of education to an unlimited number of students?
This isn't a right/left scenario, its logistics and market dynamics. Expanding access to a scarce resource means value of that resource goes down. A supply glut doesn't mean the product is any less useful, just that there's more for it so people will get to pay less for it.
I was a software consultant for many years. I'd put that on the list of truly competitive marketplaces. People were either willing to pay me to do a job or they weren't, and I would have to adjust my prices and terms to try to increase or decrease my workload.
Everyone understands that public services are free to use because they are funded by taxes. It's not the gotcha you think it is. People say that roads, K-12 education, etc are "free" when they mean there is not a direct fee to use them because they are paid for by the government using tax dollars. You don't have to pretend to not understand this
I'm not pretending to not understand here. Someone said it would be free and I'm asking how. The fact that "free" doesn't mean free is the problem, not an issue of me misunderstanding.
> You can say who's gonna pay for it for everything. Defense and meddling in world affairs is a big cost too.
For sure, no disagreement here. My personal opinion is that defense is only necessary in times of war and meddling in world affairs is never necessary.
However the US system. seems to create a lot if inefficiency. There is no free lunch. But a lunch where you don't throw out as much bread as you eat is more efficient.
If everyone has sanitised water it loses value.
Value is the overloaded word. We don't need to scarcity things so dollar number goes up for some elite group.
A good test is forget money and think of human collaboration. People doing things. Does it makes sense from that perspective.
Best way to scale Harvard is easy: make all the other places better (or if they are make people realise that)
But these are small niches that don’t make a whole sector, and arguably it’s on the fringes comparatively to everything else
Broadly speaking the so called free market is only in its name
This WAS a thing without the quotas, though.
It sounds counter intuitive, but more taxes is more fair and better as a whole. To prove, it takes no more than to look up correlation of amounts of taxes with percentages of homelessness (and other such indicators) between western countries.