I spent four years on a government-funded binge at university, and am now paying my taxes like a dutiful citizen. IMO anyone who wants to deny young adults the opportunity to make a load of friends and go off the rails before they mature a little and start contributing to society has forgotten what it's like to be an 18 year old!

This is not aimed at you; you just happened to be the comment that crystallize this thought I’ve been having for awhile.

I think this is one of the major problems with everything nowadays. Everything is so bloated and removed from its original purpose.

If we want a space for young adults to let loose and party before having to conform to adulthood, then let’s build that separate from education so my tuition isn’t paying for the frat parties that I don’t go to.

If we want diversity and inclusion, then let that be a separate nonprofit that works with schools so that my tuition isn’t paying for my college to have more administrators than professors.

Furthermore, college sports: “SHAPIRO: The principles that underlay the NCAA's philosophy seem like reasonable principles. Students should be amateurs. They should be college students. They should not be paid millions of dollars. But so many of the stories you tell seem like distortions of those reasonable principles, like people are just divorced from reality or out to get a student for no good reason. Did you get a sense of what is actually going on (laughter) in people's heads in all of these stories that you retell?

NOCERA: I think I do have a pretty good sense of it. Amateurism, which is the core principle of the NCAA, may have started out as a good idea, but with so much money now flowing into college sports, it's become a sham. And it's become kind of an excuse not to pay the labor force who are brining in the billions of dollars that are enriching everybody else. The NCAA itself is a kind of bureaucratic, rules-oriented organization…” (https://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466848768/indentured-explores...)

“The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does.” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581613)

Admittedly, I am bitter about my college experience and probably wouldn’t have such a harsh opinion if it had been better. Like the other comments here mentioned, I found a CS degree to be a sham and I learned more and better on my own than I ever did listening to professors all of whom were worse at teaching than YouTube (especially considering that high quality channels like 3Blue1Brown exist) and some of whom can’t actually speak or write English well. A CS degree didn’t help me get a job but starting a hardware club did which is where my gripe comes from. There was never funding for clubs (that actually get students doing things they would do at their future job) or for professors to do research projects that students (like me) get to help with and build job experience. But somehow the activities and recreations always got an expansion.

Government funded? Maybe in 1996.

I'm talking about what we refer to as "Student Loans" https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/student-loans-co...

"We are a non-profit making government-owned organisation that administers loans and grants to students in colleges and universities in the UK."

In many cases, it's never paid back in full, and the students don't ever need to worry about it.

From the perspective of many students, it's free money.

The deal is it's never paid back provided you stay poor (< £20k) for your whole life. Quite a high cost for a few years of drinking.

It's a sweet deal for employers to create a natural disincentive for people to ask for raises though, while keeping the outward appearance of fairness.

It's only a disincentive to ask for a raise if you don't know what it means. You only pay back student loans based on the percentage of money you earn above a certain amount.

If you earn £21,000 and the threshold is £20,000, you only pay back a portion of £1,000, not all of the £21,000.

the £1k gets turned into ~£700.

Nobody says no to an extra £700 if offered on a plate but the lower the % you get of a raise the less motivated you are to chase it.

£910 - you pay 9% over the threshold.

In my experience, student loan repayments are, until you are way above the threshold, a relatively minor number on your paycheques; dwarfed by income tax, national insurance, and pension contributions.

Why would this disincentivise asking for a raise?

The interest rates they charge on these loans and their mission statement suggest two very different motives. Mine is approaching car loan interest territory.

Nope - for many fields you actually get access to top-notch minds on the cheap in comparison to what they would be paid in the private sector. This is not to say I think the current fees based system is the way it should be financed.

That skilled labour is part of the cost paid by students, not value gained by them.

It seems your opinion puts you in the other half then.