[mishellaneous]

> if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it?

i believe the idea is that when someone is educated, it's not themselves alone that benefits from it, but rather everyone else around them. thus the interest in funding the education of other people.

> What if it takes decades or centuries to pay off for society and perhaps never for the individual (in strictly monetary terms)? How should these things be funded?

i'd look into how other things having such characteristics are funded. for example, research. a lot of research is indeed funded by companies because even though, say, "the cure for cancer" may be 40 years into the future, they do make money off of the incremental improvements along the way. what about more fundamental research? like, particle physics. or, whoever funded the research that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA, what were they thinking? i haven't read a lot about it actually, but i get the idea that they were simply some forward/long-term thinking people.

... overall, i think these are good questions. the kind of questions people with a (ideal) humanities education should be more capable of answering (mine is lacking...)