Nearly every country in the developed world, and more and more in the
developing world, provide free primary and secondary education. Such education
is generally uncontroversial and accepted as necessary by both liberals and
conservatives around the world. In the case of university education, however,
there is a great deal of disparity between countries’ education policies. In
many states students must pay fees to attend university, for which they may
seek student loans or grants. Often states offer financial assistance to
individuals who cannot afford to pay fees and lack other methods of payment. In
other states, university education is completely free and considered a
citizen’s right to attend. Debates center on the issues of whether there is in
fact a right to university education, and on whether states can feasibly afford
to finance such education.
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Individuals have a right to the experience of higher
education. It is a fundamental right of
individuals to experience university and to have access to the knowledge it
affords. University offers a huge opportunity. It is a treasure trove of
knowledge to be gained and experiences to be had. University provides an
opportunity that exists at no other time in an individual’s life. It is a
time of personal, intellectual, and often spiritual, exploration. In
secondary school and in professional life, no such opportunities exist, as
they are about instruction and following orders, not about questioning norms
and conventions in the same way university so often is. University serves as
an extremely valuable forum for different views, which everyone has a right
to experience should they wish. A life without the critical thinking tools
provided by university is less full because those without it lack the
facility by which to unlock all the doors of perception and knowledge laid
before them. University experience serves also, in its giving of these opportunities,
to shape individuals’ views of themselves and society, helping to give form
to the relationship between citizen and state on a deepened level. The state
has a duty to facilitate this development, as its responsibility includes
providing citizens with the wherewithal to take meaningful part in the
democratic process. A state can only truly be considered legitimate when an
educated electorate approves it. Without a proper education, individuals
cannot be effective citizens. A university education in the modern world is
essential to the development of such informed citizens. For this reason, free
university is a great benefit to a citizen as an exploration for his own
development on a personal level, and with his relation to society as a whole.
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There is no right to the university experience.
University life is a piss-up. Students rarely take their time in university
as seriously as some would suggest. Rather, university life is about alcohol
first, education second. Such education can provide valuable knowledge, but
it is not the responsibility of the taxpayer to fund it. Self-knowledge and
genuine wisdom come from study and reflection. This can be done anywhere, not
just in a university. There is no fundamental right of individuals to be
allowed to take four years free of charge to learn new skills that will
benefit them or how to be better citizens. The state’s duty is to provide a
baseline of care, which in the case of education secondary school more than
provides. If individuals want more they should pay for it themselves.
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The state benefits in terms of superior economic,
cultural and leadership development from a university-educated populace. A university-educated populace is of great value to
any state, and provides three main benefits. The first benefit is that it
provides extensive economic boons to society. At present, Western countries
have a substantial comparative advantage in terms of the production of
services and high technology, though this is diminishing gradually as the
developing world continues to build up technologically and economically.
There is a profound advantage to countries that actively promote a culture of
“smart economy”. By facilitating higher education, through state funding of
university study, countries increase the likelihood and quantity of
investment in their economies by both domestic and foreign firms, as a highly
educated and skilled workforce is a country trait many businesses consider
highly desirable when making investment decisions. Economic growth and
building competitiveness in the 21st century are thus dependent on
extensive investment in education. The second benefit accrued to the state
from investment in free university education is the gain in cultural
relevance it sees with a highly educated population. Students of the arts
provide extensive intangible benefits to society, through beauty in
architecture, painting, crafts, etc. Likewise students of history, literature
and classics provide boons in the form of helping society to understand
itself and its place and relevance in the world by fostering an understanding
of its past. Without free university education, fewer people would be able to
dedicate themselves to the study of such subjects, reducing the amount of
beauty and culture in society, to its detriment. The third benefit is the
development of leaders in society. States function best when the best and
brightest have the opportunity to rise to the top. The barrier to entry
created by fees and other costs of university will prevent some potentially
high-worth individuals from ever reaching levels of success. Free university
education allows all individuals to attend university, guaranteeing that the
leaders of tomorrow have the chance to show their worth. For all these
reasons, it is clear that the state benefits instrumentally from providing
free university education to its citizens.
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A highly educated populace does not provide the great
economic bounties the supporters of free university education propound.
Countries need educated people, including a certain amount of university
graduates, but the idea proposed, that everyone having a degree would benefit
society economically, is unfounded. There is no economic benefit when people
with degrees are doing jobs that do not require university education, and represents
a substantial misallocation of resources on the part of the state. As to
developing future leaders, those who are gifted or particularly driven can
still rise to the top, even if university is not free, as scholarships tend
to be mostly aimed at such individuals. Surely, society does not benefit at
all from university being free.
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Individuals have a right to equal opportunity in order
to maximize their personal utility, and to break free from the social strata
in which they are born. In order to guarantee
equality of opportunity for all citizens the state must acknowledge the right
to university education and to the opportunities such education provides.
University education gives individuals many opportunities that will serve
them enormously in later life. It does so by providing opportunities to
people while they are in university and opens doors for them once they leave.
When people are attending college they have the ability to gain exceedingly
useful information that they can employ in a future career. Likewise, the
people an individual meets while in university can be very advantageous in
later life; as a networking opportunity, university has no equal. The
advantages of attending university likewise extend to life after university,
particularly in terms of career opportunities. The employment prospects
created by a university degree are substantial, and many lines of work are
only available to university graduates. People are even hired with degrees
not specific to the job they will do, because the degree itself, not the
subject studied, is viewed as a signal of an individual’s intellectual and
professional quality. Without a university degree many paths are permanently
denied. Access to the careers and beneficial connections furnished by university
education should not be the province of the wealthy and privileged alone.
True merit should define the ability to attend university, not the accident
of birth. With the institution of fees, access becomes more difficult, and
will certainly lead to lower attendance by poorer groups, as the opportunity
cost of attendance is increased by higher prices of education. This serves to
lock people into the economic strata whence they were born and raised, as
getting out is much more difficult when denied access to most high-income
jobs. With free higher education, people have the ability to improve their
own future utility, irrespective of their present economic standing.
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There is no fundamental right to a university
education; it is a service, and people should pay for it, not freeload on the
taxpayer. Rights exist to provide people with the necessities of life. Some
people may never have the “opportunity”, ie. wealth, to visit Hawai’i, yet
that is not unfair and the state should not be expected to fund every citizen’s
tropical vacation. Yet even in the presence of fees, access to scholarships
and loans make it possible for people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds
to find their way into university. In this way there is a degree of equality
of opportunity in so far as those who are able are afforded the opportunities
financial incapacity would deny them. If people want to take advantage of the
networking opportunities available in university and the employment benefits
available to graduates, then they may pay for it.
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The burden of fees and loans are too great to expect
young people to shoulder, particularly for more financially disadvantaged
individuals. University fees, in countries
where they are implemented, are usually quite high. When fees are put in place
in countries, many people find it extremely difficult to find the funds to
pay for it, leading many people, and even most in some countries, to seek
school loans. In the United States, for example, obtaining loans for
university is the norm. These loans can weigh heavily on the minds of
university students, and put inordinate amounts of pressure to perform well.
This pressure can lead to students dropping out. This is quite understandable
when one considers the degree of pressure a young person would feel if his
school loan was collateralized against his family home. The pressure does not
end when an individual graduates, since he must then begin to pay off the
debts accrued while in university. This can lead to individuals taking jobs
to which they are not necessarily best suited in order to get started on debt
repayment immediately. Even still, repayment of loans can take many years,
even decades, leaving individuals under the thumb of creditors for much of
their working lives. With free university education, everyone can go to
college without crushing debt burden, can study what they wish, and can leave
with a qualification and no onerous debt obligations. Such a situation is
certainly desirable, for it is better for citizens to be able to gain the career
opportunities of a university education without being subjected to the
torments of crushing debt.
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Every action has an opportunity cost. If people are
willing to take loans to pay for the education that will likely allow them to
earn far more than they would without one, then they should be willing to pay
for the privilege. Furthermore, it can actually be quite beneficial to
society at large that university graduates seek swift employment due to debt,
since it forces them to become productive members of society more rapidly
than they might have done. For example, in Ireland where higher education is
free graduates often take a year or two to travel and “find themselves” while
giving little or nothing back to the state that has financed their degrees.
It is good that people begin contributing to the economic life of society
after graduating from university, rather than frittering away their youths in
unproductive pursuits.
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In order to foster social equality, the state must
actively encourage groups in society without cultures of university
attendance to seek higher education. There are often sections of society, in many countries, that on average
attend university with less frequency than even other groups with comparable
economic means. For example, poorer white Americans are still more likely to
attend university than similar poor African-Americans. The reason for this is
that the cultural impetus to attend university has an impact on whether
people attend, not simply financial means. In the case of the United States
there is a perception within inner cities that university is principally for
privileged white people.
This sentiment is pernicious, as it causes people in
such areas to not seek university education, even when they might find access
to scholarships or loans. The state can ameliorate this problem by
eliminating fees. In doing so, it can act to inculcate the notion of
university education as a right for everyone, not just the privileged, which
serves to break down cultural biases against higher education. The impetus to
attend university will benefit these disadvantaged areas by creating an
educated populace who can find work in careers other than unskilled labor and
tradecraft that currently predominate. It will also aid in rebuilding social
connections between these often-isolated groups and the rest of society.
Clearly, free university education benefits societal harmony.
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Making university free will do little to foster social
engagement from disenfranchised groups like inner city African-Americans.
Rather, free university education does little other than benefit those who
would already have attended; only without fees they can do so for free.
Groups with an anti-education bias will not simply be convinced of its merits
by its being made free. Spending taxpayers’ money on social outreach programs
and other civic activities are the way to contact these groups and encourage
them to enter university. Making university free is a pointless gesture.
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It is far from impossible to pay for free university education.
States waste money in many activities, and if they were to cut back on other
discretionary spending then the cost of free higher education would be
entirely feasible. Cuts to defense spending in countries with overinflated
militaries, or ending farm subsidies in many European states, are just some
of things states can do. Furthermore, the benefits of higher education are to
everyone, not just those who receive it directly. It is beneficial to all of
society when there are educated professionals within it. It is thus
absolutely essential for states to fund higher education, and to maximize the
numbers who attend so as to reap the rewards of an educated populace.
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The cost to the state is far too great to sustain
universal free university education. The social-democratic model, most prevalent in Europe, is a failure. The
system of paying for universal healthcare, education, pensions, etc.
threatens to bankrupt the countries maintaining them; it is simply
unsustainable. The cost of paying for free university education is ruinously
high. The government money needed to be channeled into universities to
provide for free education, as well as into various other generous social
welfare benefits, has been a case of borrowing from future generations to
finance current consumption. For these countries to survive, and lest other
countries attempt to follow suit with similar models, they must rethink what
they can afford to provide freely to citizens. In the case of education, it
seems fair to say that all states should offer access to their citizens to
primary and secondary education opportunities, since the skills acquired
during such education are absolutely necessary for citizens to function
effectively within society; reading, writing, basic civics, etc. are essential
knowledge which the state is well-served in providing. University, on the
other hand, is not essential to life in the same way. People can be
functional and responsible citizens without it; it can be nice to attend, but
one can live effectively without it. For this reason, the state must consider
university in the same way it does any non-essential service; people may pay
for it if they wish to partake, but they cannot view it as an entitlement
owed by the state that will simply provide it to everyone. The cost is just
too high, and the state must act from a utilitarian perspective in this case.
Instituting fees will place the cost of education upon those wishing to reap
the benefits of education, and not on the taxpayer.
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While there will of course be people who do not try to
get the most out of their university educations, what matters is that
everyone has access to it. It is a fair trade between inefficiencies created
by inattentive students and diligent students who would have lacked the facility
to attend without it being free. As to signaling value, there will be other
indicators of value, such as performance in university to show an
individual’s worth. More degree-holders thus do not automatically diminish
the value of having degrees.
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Maintaining a system of free university education leads
to an inefficient allocation of state resources. When the state offers a universal service,
inefficiencies inevitably arise with its provision. There are four principal
economic problems that arise from free university education. First, there is
a major problem of resources being lost to bureaucracy. In a state-funded
university system, tax money is wasted on paying civil servants to deal with
procurement questions with regard to funding for universities, as well as in
misallocation of funds due to bureaucrats’ lack of expertise and specialist
knowledge necessary to know the correct funding decisions, which independent
universities would be able to make on their own more efficiently. Second,
when the state funds all university education for free, funding will be
allocated to unprofitable courses. As there is no profit motive or price
mechanism driving these decisions, there is no way of reaching an efficient
decision except by guesswork. The funding of students who are not really
interested in attending university or who are apathetic toward higher
education creates the third problem. Such students only attend because it is
free to do so, and it would be much better to enact a system whereby such
students cannot claim a trip to university as an entitlement. A moral hazard
problem emerges among such students. They are allowed to reap all the
benefits of education, while needing to incur none of the costs. The student
who goes to university to waste three or our years and study an easy arts
course imposes an unjust cost on society, who has to pay for these students
who are not in university to gain from it, but merely to waste time and not
work hard. The fourth problem of free university education is saturation of degree-holders
in the market. In order to have value, a degree must be a signal of quality.
When everyone has a degree, the value of such a qualification plummets. The
ability for employers to ascertain high quality potential employees is thus
presented with greater difficulty in making a selection. The flipside of this
is that graduates end up serving in jobs that do not require a degree-holding
individual to do them. Thus, a system of fees is superior to free education
because it allows for more efficient allocation of resources to universities
and to individuals.
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State funding of higher education is actually
beneficial to universities. It allows universities to get on with their
research and teaching without worrying about competing and spending money on getting
students to attend. The money wasted in pursuit of high numbers of students
is thus saved, as the state can tend to the needs of universities. The idea
that the state will simply neglect its universities is silly, because society
relies on having capable professionals whose qualifications have value. It is
always in the interest of the state to promote the success of its
institutions of higher learning.
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The quality of education suffers when university
education is free. Without university
fees, universities become dependent on the state for funding. The problem
with this is that the state’s aim is to increase university attendance levels
for the sake of political gain, while at the same time striving not to
increase spending on the universities. The result is an increase in
attendance, without commensurate increase in funding from the state. This
leads to larger class-sizes and less spending per student. Furthermore, these
problems result in disconnected lecturers who, due to increased class sizes, cannot
connect to their students or offer more than cursory assistance to struggling
pupils. The decline in teaching quality is further exacerbated by their need
to focus less on teaching and more on research, which is more profitable and
thus encouraged by cash-strapped universities. With fees, on the other hand,
the quality of universities increases for three reasons. First, funding
improves, as university may charge in accordance with need rather than with
making do with whatever the state gives them to fund teaching. The result is
a consistent quality in education resources rather than it being dependent
upon what the state happens to give universities, and on how many students it
pushes to be accepted. Second, quality of teaching is improved. Because a university
wants people to attend and to pay fees, the programs and degrees they offer
have to be good signals of quality. Universities thus stay in business only
so long as they remain purveyors of high quality educational goods. They must
thus let in smart people, irrespective of their financial background, which
will in part serve to admit and finance capable people from disadvantaged
backgrounds through targeted financial aid programs. Third, the average
quality of students attending university will improve. This is because
students feel they need to get the most from their investment in education,
which can be quite substantial. They will thus be more attentive and more
interested in doing well. An example of higher quality education stemming
from fee-paying higher education systems is that of the United States, which
has twenty of the top fifty ranked universities in the world. Quality is
clearly improved when university is not free.
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Many state services are furnished that benefit a few
and are not used by others. That is often just the way such services operate.
So long as everyone has access to the service, then it is just to provide it
out of tax revenues. Every individual, when higher education is free, can
attend university without cost. That is a right every taxpayer can enjoy. If
some choose not to do so, that is fine, but it does not delegitimize the
government outlay.
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Free university education unjustly benefits one subset
of society at the expense of everyone. Not everyone goes to university. Many do not go because they simply do
not want to. Others feel they can do something more productive than
continuing in education. Yet all taxpayers fund higher education when it is a
state-funded enterprise. The state funds essential services, but higher education
is not such a service. People do not need it to live. For this reason the
state should not allow a subset of society to mooch on the taxpayer for its
own benefit. Attendees already tend to make lots more money than
non-graduates, and will, if they make good decisions, have the facility to
pay back loans if they need them in a fee-paying system. Additionally, the
specific subset free university education tends to benefit is not the
disadvantaged, the group the state talks about helping when it institutes
such policies, but rather the middle and upper classes who would have paid
fees, but now can enjoy a free education courtesy of the taxpayer. This
pattern has been seen in Ireland, for example, where poorer communities still
view higher education as something for the rich even though it is free. These
groups continue to enter the workforce in similar numbers as they had before
the ending of fees, and they still tend to prefer trade schools to
universities if they do seek qualifications beyond the secondary level.
Clearly, the implementation of free university education does not open it up
on an instrumental level to individuals who would not have attended otherwise
due to being from poor areas. Higher education is a luxury not everyone
chooses to partake of, and it certainly should not be purveyed of as a right,
but should be paid for like any other service.
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Publicly funded universities in practice do not become
parrots of the state’s agenda; far from it, in fact. Often it is public
institutions that are the most outspoken against government activities. The
University of California, Berkeley, for example, is one of the most
politically active campuses in the United States and is a public institution.
States tend to let universities govern themselves, accepting that they are
generally better at self-governance.
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State control of acceptance/curriculum criteria has
negative effects. When the state has
control of the purse strings, it wields a great deal of power over
universities. It can influence the acceptance criteria of institutions,
forcing them to accept more and more students if it feels it will have a
political benefit to do so. The state likewise can influence university
governance and curriculum. In the case of Ireland, for example, the
government has so much influence over higher education that it altered the
governing structures of the major universities in 2000 through legislation
and has representation on the Boards of each university. This degree of
control is negative to the academic independence of universities.
Universities operate best when they are independent of outside control and
agendas, yet when education is free, they are entirely in thrall to the will
of the state. This makes it far more difficult and dangerous for universities
and their staffs to speak out against government policies they disagree with,
meaning that states lose some of the value such institutions provide as
independent commentators and analysts. For the sake of free scholarship, free
university education should not be instituted.
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