Here I look at that a bit differently, and note that the entire conversation is a bit out of whack, on the left and the right.
The current left wing popular idea is that you ought to give every American a free college education. There is no such thing as a "free" anything, of course, so what that really means is that the public fund college educations for American high school graduates. The right criticizes this vociferously on economic grounds, and for some good reasons, but there are other reasons beyond that to take it on. For one, the commonly cited "the Europeans" do it isn't a good claim, because. . . .
over 40% of Americans have a college degree, while only 30% of the Swiss do. Are the Swiss international slackers? Probably not. Indeed, we have more people with college degrees than the United Kingdom, Denmark Belgium, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, South Korean and Finland do. We are on par with New Zealand and Japan and really only Russia and Canada have a true statistically greater percentage of their populations that are college educated. So it sure isn't the case that we aren't sending people to college.In other words, maybe European kids ought to be protesting that something in their system is keeping people from getting degrees.
Therefore, if measured in terms of the sheer number of people in the population who have degrees, we beat out every country except for Canada and Russia, which is pretty impressive on some level.
I don't know what that is, quite frankly, but what I wonder is if those degrees are just flat out harder to get because they're real degrees. I don't know that, but right now American universities are churning out a lot of baloney and have become refugees for people with master degrees granted following dissertations like " "It’s ‘a good thing’: The Commodification of Femininity, Affluence, and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart Phenomenon", a title so absurd I couldn't have made it up if I'd tried. There's no harm i studying that, if that's what makes you happy, but there is harm in funding that as a nation which seeks to be a world leader in science and technology benefits not one darned bit from that. I'm not saying, of course, we funded that dissertation with a loan, but we do fund others like it and we of course now have a self perpetuating system of employing people who have an academic interest in such things, which serves the nation very little.
But that's not my point here either.
My point is, when we look at other nations, we fail to consider that the nations we point to are tiny little things.
A nation like Germany, or France, can't be compared to the United States. Large sections of their populations are relatively homogeneous and their populations, while densely packed, sure don't match ours and haven't for a really long time. Germans living in rural Geramny are still Germans and still of the same culture from Germans living in big German cities, which are all right next door by American standards. That's a far cry from the situation the United States has.
So, when a "fund free university education" cry goes up, it suggests imposing on a huge country a national system that probably doesn't work very darned well at a local level.
Indeed, consider that Canada, often cited for having a publicly funded higher education system, has about the same population as California. And the economy of California is simply enormous. And it has its own needs. So, if we're going to look at a public system, why not just leave it to the states?
Oh, I hear, the states won't do it.
Oh yes they will, and one already does. Wyoming. And I'll bet it isn't the only one.
Wyoming, which has always been concerned about Wyomingites, has created a funding system that does indeed pay for a lot of the education of students who show an inclination and ability to go on. It isn't a "congratulations, you slithered through high school and now we'll fund four years of napping at a university system", but it does carry most of the burden for those students who are really going on, as long as they go on here.
This is a public funding of based, whether we realize it or not, on the Distributist principal of subsidiarity. We're taking care of our own, for our own needs, locally. And others can do this to if they wish to, and I'll be they are.
This makes a great deal more sense than a nationwide system, and indeed a nationwide system would pretty much destroy our system. Our local university and colleges have programs that are focused on our states and the graduates from them serve the state's interest in ways that other institutions don't. A nationwide system would in fact tend to counter that. If the funding is nationwide and we fund a bachelor's level program in "The Commodification of Femininity, Affluence, and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart Phenomenon" at the University of the Left Bank and suck people into that, the state isn't going to benefit at all, or at least not to the same degree that something from the UW School of Energy Resources will. So, basically, an economic model, not surprisingly, works better at a local level.
It's said, of course, that all politics is local, but in national elections that doesn't seem to be true. Just listening to the debates suggest that no local considerations really play much in the national platforms, which isn't too surprising in a Presidential campaign. But perhaps they should. So perhaps the answer to a "do you support the public funding of college educations" should be answered by "what's your state doing and why aren't you looking there". They can do it, and I'll be they do more often than people realize.
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