I think university should exist for “learning for the sake of learning” and that “everyone should go to college.” I don’t think it’s incompatible. I think someone becoming more educated has a lot of positive externalities. I think the list of positive externalities is so great that we should provide free tuition, room, board, and even a stipend to anyone willing and able to attend college. This should be funded from tax dollars, and seen as an investment in people. All of the money _will_ be returned by increased tax revenue from a more educated populous but this is just a side effect. The real benefit comes from having a more educated community capable of a high level of critical thinking.
I think you're largely right, but it's a very tough sell, particularly because of the opportunity cost. It's easy to make the case that learning is valuable in its own right, but it becomes much tougher to say, "learning is valuable in its own right so we should spend more money on it instead of spending that money on pressing and immediate issue X".
On average a college graduate will have one million dollars more of lifetime earnings than a high school graduate. This one million dollars will be taxed at at least twelve percent federally. Twelve percent is a very conservative estimation on the federal tax rate of that money. This means the federal tax revenue of a college grad is at least one hundred and twenty thousand dollars more than a high school graduate. The average net price of a public college education with room, board, fees, and tuition is fifteen thousand four hundred dollars a year, or just under sixty two thousand dollars for four years.
In four years the federal government spends $62,000 to send someone to college.
Over their lifetime the federal government receives $120,000 back.
Today we create jobs for staff, professors, admins, etc at university. Tomorrow we have a more educated and skilled workforce.
Of course, what I really want is for my fellow citizens to be more well read, better critical thinkers, and better informed citizens. Sometimes the best way to sell someone on something isn’t to focus on what you want out of the deal.
> On average a college graduate will have one million dollars more of lifetime earnings than a high school graduate.
This does not scale. Adding more college degrees does not make that many more productive jobs exist. It just moves the education bar higher for the jobs that do.
College degrees quadrupled since the 1960s. Productive jobs haven't. We already have an oversupply of degree holders working at Starbucks.
The stark reality is that the human race doesn't and can't have enough aggregate demand to productively employ everybody. The necessities of life - food, housing, medical - really only take about 10% of the population to produce and supply. Maybe another 20% in productivity-adjacent areas like finance and government services and other administration. Everything else is leisure and service economy, and there isn't infinite demand for that.
Indeed, it's just a correlation: if we sort people by how much they earn, of course university degrees will be more prevalent in the high end than in the low end. It could be that degrees cause more income, or that more income causes degrees, or that there is a common cause: people from a more well-to-do social backgrounds tend to get degrees.
Is going to college the cause of someone earning more? Or is the type of person that goes to college someone who inherently will earn more money regardless of the education level they receive? Seems to me if you took Harvard students (and not the legacy/donor admits) and had them stop at a high school education, they'd still do way better than other non-college graduates.
How many people did you know in school who were there for the education? Everyone I knew in my engineering program was there for the degree to get a good job, only 1 or 2 people I ever met genuinely wanted to understand the material, and it was kind of strange upon first realizing that. This was in a top state university.
I studied computer science at a state university. It is fully accredited, but otherwise has very little prestige.
Maybe 25% of the students in the program were there to learn how to make video games. They weren’t there to get a job in making video games. They weren’t there because there is money in making video games. They were there because they wanted to know enough about computer programming to make video games, and everyone had ideas about what type of game they wanted to make.
