[magicGLASSman]

Why not get to the root of the problem? An education should not cost that much. Much of the reason the cost has outpaced inflation is the subsidizing of the tuition price paid by the student instead of making the process of educating less costly by using technology.

Imagine what would happen if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential.

[cgearhart]

> An education should not cost that much.

This is true, but it is not the root cause of the problem - and it is a distraction from the issue because it places the blame on providers. In the past, there was no significant incentive for the cost of higher education to increase at the pace we've seen for the last 20-30 years.

The big mistake was pushing for individual loans for each student to pay for college rather than subsidizing the system. This created distorted incentives where schools needed to spend money on "extra" things to attract students who had money to spend, rather than trying to push down the cost of providing quality education to each student. Schools that didn't invest would not attract paying customers. Providing the level of service & extra amenities students expect is expensive, and carries a lot of overhead support cost from administrative staff.

> making the process of educating less costly by using technology

Technology is not a silver bullet. The cost of delivering education at scale is not where the waste is. Much like the healthcare sector, there is a huge administrative infrastructure at every school dedicated to facilitating a complex system of loans, grants, scholarships, individual payments, etc., for accounting. These jobs are unlikely to be eliminated with automation. The best answer is to make them unnecessary outright.

> if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential

A degree has never been about what you know, otherwise we'd award them to everyone who has equivalent work and life experience. But it's also not just a credential. The value of college is not limited to the academic requirements. A society benefits from an informed and educated populace, and from the personal growth that happens when smart folks learn together. That isn't to say that the country club lifestyle of American colleges today is providing services worth the cost...

[zanny]

You might be making the false correlation that education == schooling from reading your comment. Being schooled does not make you educated, and you can be educated without being schooled. Just because today the expectation in the west is extensive schooling to provide education does not mean that is the best way (or even a viable way for many) to be educated.

Personally I want there to be more coop learning. Combining democratic resources like wikibooks / open courseware and like minded individuals that want to learn the same things, plus a potential volunteer veteran or two, and for a lot of people that can produce a much better education than an overpriced book and lecture seminar with standardized testing ever could. For others, apprenticeship may be optimal. Or fully automated programs like Code Academy or Khan's Academy might be best for some, where they learn best through self-enforcement and learn-at-your-own-pace self pacing.

One of the largest takeaways from the past twenty years should be that trying to push a generation through traditional lecture-based coursework in classical university settings is not a one size fits all solution to education, and that it did not work - this article presents plenty of statistics denoting the failure of that model.

Edit: Side note, I think Stack Overflow is a great model for tutelage in the future. That is basically what it already is for the entire software community, and they have expanded the model into many other disciplines - that kind of ask a question, the community decides on the best answer, and once solved is locked / memorialized for others to easily find when they themselves encounter the same question is immensely valuable. It would be revolutionary to get most people answering their own questions through resources like that.

[npalli]

> Much of the reason the cost has outpaced inflation is the subsidizing of the tuition price

But is this really true? Student tuition debt would say otherwise. In any case, you should follow the money and see where all this cost increase has landed. Certainly isn't the professor/TA salaries. Most of the increase has flowed into administrative costs. An entire bureaucratic edifice has been constructed that contributes nothing to education. Same with healthcare. Guess what, most of the bureaucrats are Boomers!. One more reason to designate the Boomers as the worst generation.

[merpnderp]

This is what happens when incentives for efficiency are removed. In industries with large amounts of regulation we see this over and over. In education with more than 50% of money spent on administration it's just particularly obvious.

[reirob]

Education should not cost anything at all. Full stop. Free education for everybody should be considered the biggest achievement by human beings.

If a society is not able to provide free education for the upcoming generations, then the basis of such a society should be questioned, rightfully so.

[cturner]

Is there a limit to your principle?

Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend?

Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now?

Given that university-educated people earn more than other taxpayers, why is it unreasonable to expect that they should be responsible for covering the cost of their education?

Consider the deferred payment system of the Australian model.

The Swiss model is interesting as well. In Switzerland, each university has to take whoever wants to go. But there's no rules about the conditions that they give you when you get there. So if 200 people applied and they were only set up for 50 places, they could give aptitude tests to them all, and then put seats and books in the gym for the remaining 150 with instruction to submit one difficult major project for pass-fail assessment each per semester.

[ollifi]

> Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend?

One way to sort it is the finnish system where you have certain amount of months you can get paid for. Your courses are tracked and if you are enrolled but are not advancing fast enough you need to payback your benefits. If you advance to further studies you can get more months, but eventually you run out of them.

There is only so many places available to study and you need to take test to get into most places.

It's not without its problems and it certainly is not 'free'.

[orf]

> Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now?

More for profit colleges?

[lkozma]

You make some very interesting points - I just want to ask a side-question on a linguistic issue:

- do you use "disrupt" in a positive sense, or in its original dictionary sense:

"interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem, alter or destroy the structure of .."

My point is also that often when people mean to disrupt in one way, they end up achieving the other.

[cturner]

I always think of disrupt from the perspective of creative destruction, and it always being unambiguously good. So if I was in a stagnant industry, I'd be trying to reform. And if I was getting hit hard by reformers, I'd see that as justice that I was on the wrong side of.

Hence, I'm tempted to say that both meanings mean the same thing to me.

But it's interesting you raise it. I recently reread _A Second Chance at Eden_ by Peter F Hamilton. In one of the stories, a character turns down an opportunity at fabulous wealth from a mindset that it would cause vast social trauma. This seeded a thought - perhaps creative destruction is not as unambiguously good as I presume. But it still hasn't yet sunk in. (And such a correction would require a worldview rebuild - a trauma of its own :) )

[mafribe]

    Education should not cost anything at all.

Bikeshedding!

Education always costs a great deal. Teachers need to be paid, schools need buildings, universities needs labs, etc.

The only question is how payments are organised: taxes, fees, some hybrid ... Whatever mechanism is chosen, somebody feels hard up and will seek to change it.

Yet, it's always the old paying for the education of the young, just like it is always the young paying the oldies' pensions.

[kauffj]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies...

[pjscott]

Quick summary: subsidizing positional goods makes them more expensive (because there's always someone willing to pay more for a higher place on the totem pole), and it looks like this effect has driven up the cost of higher education, which is partly a positional good. Beware of throwing more money at this.

[yummyfajitas]

Assuming you are discussing college and similar forms of education with high marginal costs (e.g. stuff involving teachers), how do you prevent society from wasting resources on unproductive education?

Of course, if you are discussing education in general, the cost is already close to $0. Khan, duolingo, wikipedia, etc are all free.

[minikites]

The devices and means to access those services are far from free.

[chroma]

Well, yummyfajitas did say, "close to $0", not free. And I think you are forgetting about libraries. They offer Internet access and they are far cheaper than colleges.

Edit: In 2011, the cost for all libraries in the US was $11.5 billion.[1] In the same year, $483 billion was spent in the US on college education.[2] That's a 42x difference. Granted, the uses and use-cases are different. But anyone who can go to college can, if they have the motivation, get the same knowledge for far cheaper.

Of course (excepting a few unusual disciplines like programming), credentials help one's career more than knowledge.

1. https://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/FY2012%20PLS_Tabl...

2. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_029.asp

[dawnbreez]

If nobody pays the professors, how do they pay for lunch?

[spacehome]

Eat the students.

[UK-AL]

There is a cost to education regardless, what's in question is who pays it.

Somebody has to use resources to build, pay salaries, pay for research etc

[xyzzy4]

> Education should not cost anything at all. Full stop. Free education for everybody should be considered the biggest achievement by human beings.

So taxpayers should foot the bill for someone to get an expensive degree in women's studies or sports management?

[unknownzero]

I went almost straight into the workforce instead of going to college so I feel like I should be on your side here. However I don't think I would really mind some of my tax dollars going to people thinking about women in society as I rather like women, or managing sports teams, as I also enjoy watching sports. Is this opinion entirely out of vogue now? What the hell else am I getting out of my sizable federal tax bill?

[bitserf]

When you hear the word "taxpayer" brought up in an argument, it's a good hint that what will follow is a screed against providing anyone any assistance from the public purse whatsoever, despite any such benefits the author may have received and conveniently forgotten in their personal "self made man" narrative.

[grecy]

>If a society is not able to provide free education for the upcoming generations, then the basis of such a society should be questioned.

And every developed country/society on the planet has done it, except one.

It's extremely obvious which society has it figured out when you move from a country where people are encouraged and paid to further their education, to one where people take on crushing debt to get it. It genuinely feels like a society of slaves in comparison.