How could you be against free college. Like if I think about student loans for more than a few minutes I think about jumping off a cliff have some pity damn
Because hundreds of thousands of people have already paid for their tuition. Should they be reimbursed? It’s not fair to the people who have already paid/ are paying for college. That’s why.
Yeah I love thinking how my kids are gonna cry and have panic attacks because of the heavy student loans they’re gonna have just because they want to go to a good school. Yeah I really want them to suffer just like I did bc yknow I paid why should they have it any easier than me?? I don’t want America to be better than I found it. Fuck future generations.
i dont think we should use cars because it’s not fair to the people who had to travel via horseback. should they be resurrected with necromancy and allowed to apply for a drivers license? think logically here
Also, like, I am one hundred percent in favour of people being reimbursed actually. That sounds like a great next step!
I’m 35, and I’m still paying my loans. Would I like to be reimbursed? Fuck yeah. But I also support free college from this moment on.
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who say “I suffered, why shouldn’t they?” And those who say “No one should have to suffer like I did.”
If you’re the former kind? Fuck you.
Ok guys, I agree with you completely. The obvious answer is that we should make college free. College is outrageously expensive, and making it free would allow everyone access without forcing anyone into debt.
But there’s a presumption backing this “obvious” answer, and the presumption is that college is necessary. It would be perfectly reasonable in a context where the thing involved (i.e., food, clean water, etc.) is a basic human need, but college is not. Besides the excessively high monetary cost, there’s also a high high opportunity cost. It takes four whole years out of your life. And for what? The coursework isn’t applicable to the real world, and a degree is not a good way to get a job. College is not the only path to success, and for many people, it’s not even a very good one. It just puts you in a ton of debt for no good reason.
But even if college isn’t necessary, what harm would it do for college to be free for those who want to attend? After all, debt is crippling the nation’s youth, and wouldn’t it be nice if that went away? Of course only a stingy old fart who doesn’t think young people “deserve” an education would say free college is bad, right?
To answer these questions, let me skip back in time and tell you a story. It is 1920. The uppermost level of compulsory education isn’t 12th grade, it is 8th. High school as we know it now does not exist; in its place sits something that looks more like college did recently: an elite, expensive program which only accepts the top 5% of applicants. Because high schools only accept the very best, those who graduate are almost guaranteed high-paying jobs.
This changed in 1954. Some guys saw all the high school graduates getting great jobs and had a bright idea. If we make high school free, they thought, then everyone will be able to get a high school education, and thus, a great job!
The problem was that the only reason high school graduates had gotten great jobs was because of the rarity, not the quality, of their education. And over the next fifty years, as high school was made free and subsequently mandatory, a high school education became completely useless. The only thing gained was four more years of compulsory schooling before children, now more properly young adults, could begin working.
This has already happened before! This whole argument and discussion, “should we take this elite program and make it free”, “of course we should because it’ll give everyone good jobs”, it’s happened before! It will be just as ineffective this time as it was last time, because nothing has changed. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is still a logical fallacy, and people are still making it. In the exact same way as before. Those who fail to learn from history are, as they say, doomed to repeat it.
Now let me present a possible vision of the future. It is 2056. College has been made free and mandatory, and the little value it still had has been completely erased. The only thing gained has been four more years of compulsory schooling before young adults, now more properly adults, can begin working. The societal definition of “child” goes from “under 18” to “under 24”. The average human lifespan doesn’t change, it simply becomes normal that humans spend the first full quarter of their lives in the artificial school environment, which is just as pointless as ever: the students care as little about learning as the teachers care about teaching, nobody gets paid enough, and everyone is miserable. One day, a 24-year-old kid reads an article which says people are trying to make graduate school free, and she thinks, “Huh. That seems like a good idea. Then, everyone could have a good education for free.”
In writing this, I don’t want to cast my ballot on this issue as “the system is fine the way it is”, because the system is not fine. This post and the responses to it demonstrate as much. But the way to fix it is not to commit the same logical fallacy that we already made less than a century ago. The problem is complicated, and a complicated problem cannot be fixed with a three-word solution. “Make college free” is not the answer.
I hope I can open a discussion on the real answer. It will have to contain a solution to the college debt crisis. It will have to take into account the fact that our current public school system was designed to churn out good factory workers, despite the fact that we now need entrepreneurs instead. Preferably, it should contain a solution to the public school system’s current problem of not teaching important skills (how to pay taxes, what laws exist and how to change them, etc), but I know better than to get my hopes up. I’ll settle for just finding a way to teach skills that are legitimately important for purposes of starting a career. But even if I can do none of that, I hope that it at least made you consider this debate in a different light.
Make college cheaper, then, if it being free would cause a problem. (OR MAYBE WE CAN RETURN TO THE TIME WHERE HOMES DIDNT COST SO DAMN MUCH AND WHEN THE ECONOMY DIDNT SUCK ASS???)
Anxiety-prone-human 