[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 :) )