San Francisco, New York as a whole state and other areas are offering fully paid 4 year in-state tuition. Here's what I do and don't like about it:

Pros:
1. Boosts the education level of your city/state
2. Higher level workforce
3. Higher earners in your state/city (assuming college degrees = higher lifetime earnings
4. Due to higher earnings, less debt default and higher income and property tax revenue for the city/state

Cons:
1. Typically these programs don't have GPA requirements, so a student can fuck up and taxpayers have to pay it.
2. Often don't have graduation requirements. So you can go through 2-3 years, then quit and the taxpayers pay for it
3. Only free if your parents' income is under $100k/year. Pretty shitty if you have parents who don't want spoiled brat kids and don't give their kids money for college tuition. It rewards people for making less money, not sure how that's fair.

Solutions:
1. Make it a reimbursement program. You're on the hook 100% UNLESS you maintain a 2.5+ GPA and graduate within 6 years.
2. Force community college for the first 2 years. Community college is already much cheaper. If you want the free education, bite the bullet and sorry you don't get to enjoy the awesome life that collegetowns offer. Do well in community college, then you can be eligible for the free bachelors degree programs.

I think those are reasonable requirements.

Personally I think it's kind of pathetic that a basic college education still costs in the United States. If we are going to stay ahead of the next wave of automation we need to expand education the same way we made high school free and available for everybody the last time we had an automation crisis.

I think community college is essentially just an extension of high school and should be free. I find it odd that the first 1-2 years of college are just repeats of the classes you just took in high school i.e. bio 101, English 101 and 102, math/statistics 101, chem 101, history 101, etc. Why the fuck are those even required? Never understood it, and I'm not talking remedial classes. I'm talking the true 101-102 level classes on the same basic shit from high school.

This post was edited by AspenSniper on Apr 10 2017 07:53am

The problem comes with your adviser who has the final say to put you in those classes, and the compass score.

Have a good relationship with your adviser -> Talk to them about what classes you really want, as community colleges (most) offer those classes higher than what you mentioned.

Score good on the compass test -> Automatically put in those higher classes.

If you score shit on compass, and it puts you in the lower classes, but you literally took 2x+ higher classes in high school... yeah that's when most people just say fuck it, i'll take them again "i'm in college!".

However, students don't realize that you can talk to your adviser about it and be put into the higher classes by his admission. And if you just completed higher classes in high school your adviser would 99% do it.

It all honestly comes down to lack of communication between advisers and students and also how the colleges` compass tests are constructed. Just for example, I was put into basic math 56, when I just got done fucking completing pre-calculus in highschool. And I never talked to my adviser to get in the correct classes, so I wasted almost a year of my life just "meeting the prerequisites".

Compass tests are also complete bullshit and shouldn't be mandatory unless you haven't been to college in xxx years and forgot everything. Or if you want to take them, but if you are hot out of high school there is no reason community colleges should put people in those lower classes.

This is just my experience from my community college. I'm sure all the other ones do it differently too, which makes it even more of an issue

This post was edited by JohnMiller92 on Apr 10 2017 08:32am

I never really understood why people want to base things off parents income.

All that does is just create a more convoluted process.

I personally think the best system would be state schools are free and if failure to get a degree or maintain a good GPA the punishment is a tax penalty that would be applied on income taxes and the tax penalty is removed when you have obtained a degree. This creates an incentive for people at any point to take their education seriously.

Also at least for the next 25-50 years, we need more young people being trained in the trades. Plumbers/welders and other handy man type jobs aren't going to be automated still for a while. Someone doing a generally more higher skilled blue color job needs to have the stigma removed off of it.

Need to train kids better in K-12 and push them towards a path of being ready for educating themselves beyond high school and those who wish to do skilled labor , make those opportunities better as well.

The reality is the more skilled and more educated our population is, the less effect the future will have on gen x going into their 60-70s and Millennials entering the middle part of their life. I like to be optimistic but it's easy to be a cynic nowadays.

One of the big reasons is because high schools can't be trusted to uniformly teach those subjects. You would think CHM 101 would be tought in high school, but when I took high school I had an "intro to chemistry" class that basically only covered four weeks of college chemistry.

Also often enough those courses are for students who didn't take them in high school and who just took the remedial classes and got into a state school. Or maybe for people who changed majors who never thought they would be a chemistry student.

Overall it's not very expensive to have them take those classes since they can be written off as general education classes that you would replace with something else regardless. Undergraduate is also about being well rounded, so there's also that.

can we take a page from Europe's book and give the free tuition to people who scored in the top percentile of a series of exams?

I noticed a huge jump from High School to University
Don't know about colleges



It's a great excuse for making you take more classes and pay more money.

This post was edited by FroggyG on Apr 10 2017 09:14am

That it is as well. I won't disagree, but there is some value to taking philosophy classes and such.

I'm completely baffled by the fact that the USA are yet to even consider the ECTS. I'm not saying that the American education needs to be compatible with that of the EU (this would probably be unrealistic), but the system with credit costs & rewards work perfectly.