I'll start by saying that tuition has gotten completely out of hand. In addition, housing is ridiculously nice on many campuses and in University housing off campus. I heard someone say recently that kids now live like professionals while in college only to live like college students once they become professionals.
The amount of debt that has been accumulated is staggering. Receivables from student loans makes up the single largest asset on the Federal gov't balance sheet. Right at 50% of total assets.
A certain portion of the population thinks all kids are entitled to a college education thus the push for free tuition for all. Just on the surface it waters down the value of the education but it goes much deeper.
For instance if the gov't gets involved in that kind of program there will have to be certain metrics in place to measure the "quality" of the education and of the institutions. The same thing that happened to public schools with the creation of the department of education and standardized testing will happen, in some form, to higher education institutions. Institutions will be able to receive that gov't money based on their "success" rate as determined by percentiles and curves rather than the ultimate success of their students 20 years down the road when they are thinking about where and how to send their own kids to college. That conformity to gov't standardizing means things have to be dumbed down so that the student population fits nicely inside the curve. You can't have the kid going to Stanford or Harvard getting a better education than the kid going to UTEP right?
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