[otalp]

Personally I think there may be better ways to spend money, but it's interesting that tuition-free college, which is the norm in europe, is considered something the US "can't afford" while a 700 billion dollar increase in military spending is passed without blinking an eye by people who've spent 8 years complaining about deficit.

The huge money sink in the US budget is undoubtedly the military. After the current increase the US probably spends more on military than the next 13 or 14 countries combined. If that can be reduced to spending about 2.5x what China spends(still overkill considering the allies the US has) then you have about 350 billion a year to either spend or reduce the deficit with. More than enough to eliminate child hunger, healthcare problems and infrastructure issues.

[dragontamer]

There are other cultural issues stopping tuition-free college in the USA. At best, tuition-free community college is the best we might be able to hope for.

Case in point: Europeans don't have for-profit companies extracting wealth from uneducated Americans.

There's fundamental problems to the US's education system at play here. We can't throw money at the problem and hope for it to work. We have to culturally fix those issues.

[otalp]

Tuition was free for in-state students during America's peak post war years in California and other places. It's not like it's completely alien to America. Nobody is advocating "throwing money" at the issue but you can't just sit around waiting for cultural change without doing anything about it.

[dragontamer]

State-based tuition would work out in America, but case in point on how awful our educational infrastructure is:

National Accreditation is basically a joke. Only regional accreditation matters. If people actually want to have "free college for everyone in the USA", step one would be to actually DEFINE a college education on the national level.

Which the USA does NOT have yet. We are very far away from the point of "sink money into this project". Ever talk education in the USA? How did "Common Core" do? The political culture is incredibly sensitive and paranoid about education changes.

Just think about how such a "free tuition" project would work. You'd have to have a national team standardize a curriculum. You'd have to then inspect various colleges to make sure they're up to standard. The ones that aren't up to standard lose federal money (aka: free tuition money), so it would be a death-spell for any school who fails.

Its not compatible with US Culture. US Citizens are too particular about how their children are taught, and would never accept people from far away telling them that... well... Thomas Jefferson is a founding father (https://thinkprogress.org/texas-board-of-education-cuts-thom...) or that the Earth is older than 6000 years old, or that Radioactive dating works.

Education barely even is a money problem. Its mostly political. Frankly though, I'd prefer if we fixed our High Schools first. Clearly a high school education isn't enough for most jobs anymore.