[rant]Contact Hour Billing

[Jeunemaitre]

Fneh.

I've said it once, I'll say it again:

Free public education in all areas of learning, to whatever level we can reasonably provide (bachelor's degree, perhaps?).

I admire your faith in people to take seriously a free public education, but I’m afraid that a such a system would not garner attention from students because they made no investment in the process. I find that most people at my current school (as noted previously: Northern Virginia Community College) pay no head to the ~$170 per course that they pay, and many pay little attention to the grades they receive, and think nothing of dropping courses habitually because they choose not to show up for the first exam. From my own experience, though there may still have been a segment of the population at my undergraduate institution (Syracuse University) that was concerned only with enjoying the “college atmosphere,” a far higher percentage were concerned with getting something out of the (A) money they were paying, (B) debt they were accruing, C) combination of (A) and (B).

The positive externalities of education may quite possibly, as you state, exceed the cost of taxes paid to fund the system, however, you might only succeed in driving the job market to place a greater emphasis on post-graduate degrees (which is already taking place). If free public education in the US is extended to the level of a Bachelor’s degree, or even an Associate’s degree, these would become the new standard of education, taking the place of the high school diploma. The job market would then pass by the folks who received a free BA (or BS or AAS) and start asking “from which school did you receive your MS (MA or MPH or MPP or Ph.D or Psy.D) degree?” We’d still be complaining about the hassle of higher education, but we’d start talking more about post-graduate and post-doc programs, rather than 2- or 4-year colleges and universities.

[edit-sometimes and B in parentheses is just a B in parentheses]