[insightcheck]

It's fair that the funding of programs just to let people satisfy intellectual curiosity may not be convincing to many taxpayers.

However, real benefits of government funding can still exist. If we agree that work by PhD students in the humanities can create real benefits for a country, then there can be real benefits to having researchers come from a variety of economic upbringings, not just from wealthy backgrounds.

Many academics do social science research on how to craft better policies to improve the health and economic outcomes of underdeveloped rural parts of a country. They can arguably do more effective research if some of the researchers are from a low-income rural background. To achieve this benefit, a social science undergraduate education would need to be subsidized, so the student is eligible to work at the PhD level.

[peyton]

> They can arguably do more effective research if some of the researchers are from a low-income rural background.

Surely by now such an argument can be made with data rather than rhetoric? “There can be real benefits to having researchers come from a variety of economic upbringings” is a testable hypothesis. It would be unscientific to advance a funding regime geared towards this absent data.

[insightcheck]

I couldn't find data from a quick search, though I did find a study where researchers groups with a higher diversity of "ethnicity, age, gender, and affiliation" tended to have higher citation counts. [1]

Still, it's not too out there to say that a researcher who grew up in a low-income family can provide a very useful perspective for designing research for addressing poverty (even at least for designing research questions and better recruiting participants). I concede that the evidence may not reach the bar for large, massive investment, but it could at least be promising for at least some funding as a starting point—at least some needs-based scholarships.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6701939/

[hackerlight]

That benefit isn't large enough to justify the cost. If you're just talking about subsidizing the education of the most promising 5 percent of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, then sure. Otherwise, no.

[t-3]

It's too late to change. The economic damage of pulling back government spending for financial aid would totally destroy many schools and the cities and businesses that have grown up around/downstream of them.

[hackerlight]

Protecting jobs is not an argument for continuing wasteful spending. The same argument can be deployed to justify agricultural subsidies and many other wasteful practices. The net result is significant harm, even if locally and short-term it is the path of least resistance. It's procrastination at the level of a country.

[t-3]

You're not wrong, but when it comes to political will for change, destroying jobs and opportunity is not a good look. Democracies really cannot effectively avoid handouts to entrenched interests.