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Education is never free; it always consumes some resources. The question is who should pay the cost: the student or everyone else? In cases where basically everyone needs the education to succeed in society and the positive externalities are large (e.g., teaching young children to read), I think that the case for "everyone else" paying is pretty strong. In cases where the education is mostly consumption (i.e., the benefits all go to the student), the case for subsidizing is weak (e.g., a trust-fund kid getting multiple PhDs in impractical fields to have something to do). So the main issue becomes: where does a Bachelor's degree lie on this spectrum? 1. Fields of study are very heterogeneous. Some majors have a much larger return on investment than others, so subsidizing all "higher education" equally probably doesn't make sense. 2. Even in Western Europe, college attendance rates are only around 1/3. Is it right to have that 1/3 subsidized by the 2/3 who don't go to college, and who on average have lower income? 3. (More speculative) To some extent, the payoff to a college education is not because of what you learn, but in signaling that you're a smart, conscientious, perseverant person. In that case, a degree becomes less valuable the more people that have them, and the case for subsidizing what has become an arms race becomes a lot weaker. 4. If we spend a lot of money and effort propping up the current, very expensive, forms of higher education, we might discourage better ways of educating from emerging. One example is something like Coursera, where the marginal cost of adding one more student is basically zero, and everyone can learn from the very best educators in the field. Another would be separate institutions for education and for testing / accreditation. This would help with grade inflation, bring back the focus in the educational institutions to teaching rather than credentialing, and provide more accountability (% of graduates passing a common exam is a lot easier to compare than future income of graduates, and is less confounded by things like socio-economic status of students). |