If you know of another way to get government-subsidized, interest-deferred or interest-free loans to spend four years of your life professionally learning, and that have generous deferment provisions after you're done with those four years of professional learning, let me know. I'd love to access that money.
"Smart societies have free education, and their schools may not be always as good as those that you pay for with half of your life or so but they're adequate enough."
I would like you to name those smart societies with free education and world-class universities. Notice the Shanghai Jiao Tong University list of schools: http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp .
The problem with "free" education is that a) it isn't really free -- someone is paying; b) as with so many "free" things, you get what you pay for to some extent; and c) people without any skin in the game aren't likely to value their "free" education as much. Any society you manage to name with a nominally free university education is going to suffer from some or all of those problems.
(Note: the above isn't to say American universities are optimal, or that they don't have problems: they do. But the solutions are not to proclaim that everything should be free, as if there is no such as opportunity cost, or that free from the student's perspective is equivalent to free from society's perspective.)
Free from the students perspective is actually a net gain for society because a better educated general public benefits everybody, not just the students.
Not 100% free but the stipend more than makes up for the very low tuition fee. There are also private schools and universities in France, they charge considerably more.
... and France's first university on the Shanghai Jiao Tong list: about 40. And it goes down from there, probably in large part because its universities are underfunded, like most of Europe's.
Free from the students perspective is actually a net gain for society because a better educated general public benefits everybody, not just the students.
The question is what happens on the margins and whether there are enough university slots for everyone who wants to go. In the U.S., there basically are, especially when one takes into the community college -> four year path. From what I understand, in most of Europe this is a continual problem.
I think your example does more to prove my point than disprove it.
There are plenty of American Universities below position 40 on that list. I also doubt that if France would suddenly start to charge its students a huge tuition fee that the scores would go up dramatically.
Given the size of the respective economies of France and the US it is actually surprising to see them in the top 40, I would never have expected that, if tuition were the secret then they should have been near position 100 or lower.
The first 39 slots are divided between the US, Japan, England, Canada and Switzerland.
If you know of another way to get government-subsidized, interest-deferred or interest-free loans to spend four years of your life professionally learning, and that have generous deferment provisions after you're done with those four years of professional learning, let me know. I'd love to access that money.
"Smart societies have free education, and their schools may not be always as good as those that you pay for with half of your life or so but they're adequate enough."
I would like you to name those smart societies with free education and world-class universities. Notice the Shanghai Jiao Tong University list of schools: http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp .
The problem with "free" education is that a) it isn't really free -- someone is paying; b) as with so many "free" things, you get what you pay for to some extent; and c) people without any skin in the game aren't likely to value their "free" education as much. Any society you manage to name with a nominally free university education is going to suffer from some or all of those problems.
(Note: the above isn't to say American universities are optimal, or that they don't have problems: they do. But the solutions are not to proclaim that everything should be free, as if there is no such as opportunity cost, or that free from the student's perspective is equivalent to free from society's perspective.)