Should Education Be Cheaper?
Education is already free. Most people in most countries get an education up to and maybe even beyond High School and they get it for free. The question is if higher education should be cheaper, and the fact is that it should be. The Economics of Why Higher Education Is So ExpensiveBack during the Clinton administration, the immoral president was doing one thing right.
He was slowly growing the economy in the US without driving the country into further debt. More jobs were being created and workers with degrees were in bigger demand. Since the country could afford it, and since the country needed more skilled workers, the Clinton administration decided to make it easier for people to get student loans. (Krueger, Alan, and Bowen, 1993).This was fine all the way up until the economy took a turn for the worse when we all found out that the banks had been getting one over everybody.
The country couldn’t afford to subsidize student loans. During the Obama administration, to win votes, Obama made it even easier to get student loans. Since just about anybody could get a student loan for thousands upon thousands of dollars, most US colleges and universities increased their prices. In fact, during the Obama administration, colleges and universities in the US raised their prices an average of 3x the rate of inflation each year for eight years. Colleges and universities justified the new prices by hiring staff members for gender tolerance, for safe space administration, and a whole bunch of other labeling nonsense. The fact is that colleges and universities raised their prices because they could.
Why charge a student $14,000 when a student can easily get a loan for $45,000? (Kamenetz, 2006.)Will Higher Education Ever Be Cheaper in the US?No politician will ever try to make it more difficult for students to get a student loan because it would lose a lot of votes. Even despite the student loan bubble that threatens to bring on another depression, a government would rather hit buyers and workers with bigger taxes than make it more difficult to get a student loan. What is worse is that making it easier for students to get out of their loans, such as having them expire after 20 years, is a big vote getter, which is why many political candidates often say they will make it easier to get out of your student loans. (Marshall, Stephen James, 2018).
Should Higher Education Be as Cheap as It Is in The East?No, it should not. One of the easiest scams to pull in the US is to visit a country with a student visa, to work illegally while there and to have essay writing services complete their coursework. At the end of it, the immigrant has had four to seven years of tax-free working income and may even walk away with a degree because the essay writing service did all the work for them. We have all come across doctors, vets and dentists who are woefully incompetent and who barely speak English. Have you never wondered how these people got their qualifications? If you make higher education as cheap as it is in places such as India, then you risk making the USA a hotspot for foreign students looking to make a few easily bucks. (Martin, Philip, 2018).
Conclusion – What Are the Solutions?The student debt bubble needs to be addressed by making it harder for students to get student loans. The price of higher education needs to be reduced by getting back to paying teachers and not having massive teams of administrators. Also, higher education needs to diversify in a way that makes skill-based qualifications as important as degrees. The truth is that more people make millions through selling caravans in the US than they do from being a doctor. Skill-based education would diversify and flesh out the US workforce so that companies wouldn’t have to look to immigrants for things such as plumbing, gas fitting, concrete manufacture, and so forth.
BibliographyKamenetz, Anya. Generation debt: Why now is a terrible time to be young. Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2006.Krueger, Alan B., and William G. Bowen.
“Policy watch: Income-contingent college loans.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7.3 (1993): 193-201.Marshall, Stephen James. “Financial Challenges, Constraints and Consequences of Funding Higher Education.
” Shaping the University of the Future. Springer, Singapore, 2018. 103-121.Martin, Philip. “Remittances, migration, and trade.” Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations (2018).
