Inevitably the comparison will be made to those countries that provide free higher education as being superior. I strongly disagree, for several reasons:
1. Anything that's free but is limited gets abused. You need look no further than the NHS in the UK were most GPs are employees of the NHS. Office hours of 9-4 (ie no incentive to provide a better service) are typical, the system clogged up with people who either don't need to see a doctor or, in the case with many old age pensioners, they simply go to the doctor for someone to talk to.
2. I would love to see some study in this but it is my belief that reducing the cost of higher education increases the earning potential of college graduates. When I went to university (in Australia) it certainly seemed to be the case that the earning potential difference between graduates and non-graduates wasn't anywhere as near as the difference in the US;
3. Free systems create extra demand from people who don't really want to be there and are simply going for the lifestyle, which may in turn keep others who really want to go out;
4. Governments may pay per college student but those funds aren't distributed equally. When I went almost nothing was spent on first-year students. Most of that money was diverted to research activities, which brings into question the quality of education the government was paying for;
5. If you accept the premise that paid college leads to higher earning potential, countries that have free higher education will lose people to those countries where you pay as the labour mobility is high and only getting higher. I believe this at least in part explains the brain drain from Eastern Europe to the US in the 90s; and
6. Demand will be increased by other countries. In Germany, for example, you have a lot of Brazilians who go there for free university, typically going there for 6-12 months prior to learn German.
One of the reasons that college costs so much is probably the same reason health care (in the US) costs so much: it's a protected market of sorts. In the US, IP laws mean drugs in Canada and elsewhere cost a fraction of what they do in the US (and most of the cost basis for drugs in the US goes on marketing not research).
If you want to be a doctor (of cours) you need to go to college. But what about a computer programmer? Many of the best companies will require a college degree. A computer science education is obviously useful but not a prerequisite to learning to program. Most programmers I know learnt to program before or outside college.
So what you have a captive market.
It would be reasonable to assume that competition between colleges would sort this out but that doesn't seem to be the case. Sure there is competition for students and teaching/research talent but that's not the same thing. For example, a friend of mine believes (rightly or wrongly) she'll probably never get a great teaching job because her PhD (in history) isn't from a top school like Harvard or Princeton (IIRC).
So you can choose to make a purely economic decision and go to a cheaper school but the cheaper and more expensive schools aren't necessarily equivalent, either in fact or in perception (which can be far more important).
I suspect this won't change until something disrupts the higher education system itself.
> Anything that's free but is limited gets abused. You need look no further than the NHS in the UK were most GPs are employees of the NHS. Office hours of 9-4 (ie no incentive to provide a better service) are typical, the system clogged up with people who either don't need to see a doctor or, in the case with many old age pensioners, they simply go to the doctor for someone to talk to.
Actually, my experience in Brazil seems to provide counter-evidence to that. Higher education here can be either public or private. There are federal and state universities, but also it is reasonably easy to open a private college and get federal certification for it. In the public universities, in general, there is a far higher pressure for excellence at all levels, from admissions to lecturing and research (indeed, it is usual that the more interested undergrads will work on research projects during their course), and research specially is almost lacking in the private universities.
It is generally accepted here that if your objective is to make money the first thing that goes is demands on research (which is expensive and doesn't make much money for the university), closely followed by standards (as the more people you let in and the higher grades you give them the better-oiled the assembly line is and you can effectively print money as long as you don't lose your government certification).
In the public realm the people are kept motivated by: (1) the promise of very early tenure (effectively one year after you're hired by a public university), (2) the not-so-high salary, with availiability of extra funds in the form of productivity grants (for a researcher's personal use, not necessarly to hire students, etc), (3) the decoupling of the adviser's money from the students' funding (which ends up giving the students more freedom).
Your conclusions are poorly supported by the evidence and reasoning you proffer.
> 1. Anything that's free but is limited gets abused.
Free does not mean unrestricted. Degrees in law and medicine are highly sought in Denmark, and the universities raise the academic requirements for initial entry and continued study accordingly.
> 2. I would love to see some study in this but it is my belief that reducing the cost of higher education increases the earning potential of college graduates. When I went to university (in Australia) it certainly seemed to be the case that the earning potential difference between graduates and non-graduates wasn't anywhere as near as the difference in the US
Supposing there is a correlation, what is its relative significance? For example, Danish doctors are paid less than most of their US counterparts. But that is due to uniform salary standards in the public healthcare system.
> 3. Free systems create extra demand from people who don't really want to be there and are simply going for the lifestyle, which may in turn keep others who really want to go out
How so? If the academic standards are raised to compensate for higher demand, only the most talented and willful be able to complete their studies. On the contrary, in an educational system where money is often the gating factor, you lose talented people who cannot afford tuition.
> 4. Governments may pay per college student but those funds aren't distributed equally. When I went almost nothing was spent on first-year students. Most of that money was diverted to research activities, which brings into question the quality of education the government was paying for;
Professors are contractually obligated to spend a large percentage of their time on teaching. As a consequence, assuming you don't teach empty classrooms, the total teaching load across a faculty scales roughly with the number of students.
The first-year classes are cheaper to teach per student because classes are larger. But if you break everyone into groups of 15-20 people with their own TA (another professor or graduate student), the quality of the teaching doesn't suffer. In fact, the best teachers usually teach the first-year classes.
I don't see a difference here compared to US universities.
In Denmark there's no such thing as a research-only professorship supported by per-student government contributions, and equipment expenses and research assistant salaries are only covered at a very low level or not at all. My cousin is a biomedical researcher at the University of Aarhus, and his group spends an inordinate amount of time on applying for research grants to cover such expenses. That part is not very different from the US.
> 6. Demand will be increased by other countries. In Germany, for example, you have a lot of Brazilians who go there for free university, typically going there for 6-12 months prior to learn German.
That's a real and present problem but it can mitigated by stricter quotas. From talking to academics at Danish universities, my sense is that many Ph. D. programs are being overrun by Chinese students who are studious but not very talented. For various reasons, that hasn't happened at the undergraduate level.
1. Anything that's free but is limited gets abused. You need look no further than the NHS in the UK were most GPs are employees of the NHS. Office hours of 9-4 (ie no incentive to provide a better service) are typical, the system clogged up with people who either don't need to see a doctor or, in the case with many old age pensioners, they simply go to the doctor for someone to talk to.
2. I would love to see some study in this but it is my belief that reducing the cost of higher education increases the earning potential of college graduates. When I went to university (in Australia) it certainly seemed to be the case that the earning potential difference between graduates and non-graduates wasn't anywhere as near as the difference in the US;
3. Free systems create extra demand from people who don't really want to be there and are simply going for the lifestyle, which may in turn keep others who really want to go out;
4. Governments may pay per college student but those funds aren't distributed equally. When I went almost nothing was spent on first-year students. Most of that money was diverted to research activities, which brings into question the quality of education the government was paying for;
5. If you accept the premise that paid college leads to higher earning potential, countries that have free higher education will lose people to those countries where you pay as the labour mobility is high and only getting higher. I believe this at least in part explains the brain drain from Eastern Europe to the US in the 90s; and
6. Demand will be increased by other countries. In Germany, for example, you have a lot of Brazilians who go there for free university, typically going there for 6-12 months prior to learn German.
One of the reasons that college costs so much is probably the same reason health care (in the US) costs so much: it's a protected market of sorts. In the US, IP laws mean drugs in Canada and elsewhere cost a fraction of what they do in the US (and most of the cost basis for drugs in the US goes on marketing not research).
If you want to be a doctor (of cours) you need to go to college. But what about a computer programmer? Many of the best companies will require a college degree. A computer science education is obviously useful but not a prerequisite to learning to program. Most programmers I know learnt to program before or outside college.
So what you have a captive market.
It would be reasonable to assume that competition between colleges would sort this out but that doesn't seem to be the case. Sure there is competition for students and teaching/research talent but that's not the same thing. For example, a friend of mine believes (rightly or wrongly) she'll probably never get a great teaching job because her PhD (in history) isn't from a top school like Harvard or Princeton (IIRC).
So you can choose to make a purely economic decision and go to a cheaper school but the cheaper and more expensive schools aren't necessarily equivalent, either in fact or in perception (which can be far more important).
I suspect this won't change until something disrupts the higher education system itself.