re: #28 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

I for one agree with Pete on this issue (about college). I go farther and assert that trying to call 4 years of college education “free” is itself a from of misdirection. 4 years of college education is a highly expensive affair, by which I mean not the price tag which students see, but the very nature of the activity. Trying to hide that cost blurs over the very preciousness of those 4 years and talent it takes to teach the students.

So, once again, there’s something the US can’t do that other industrialized countries have been able to do for a while now.

Of course college costs. Any post-secondary education, such as trade school, costs. And we pay for it. The question becomes do we pay for it now, or pay for it later. If we pay for it now, we use a progressive tax system to make sure people get the education they need to be contributing adults. If we don’t pay for it now, we pay in multiple ways:

1. Graduates are feeding a good chunk of their earnings to loan companies rather than buying houses and cars and vacations and other things in the economy, ultimately meaning this money ends up in the accounts of the wealthy who don’t spend it.

2. Similarly, they aren’t having children now because they can’t afford them.

3. Because they’re having to pay for their loans, they need higher salaries than they otherwise would, which makes things more expensive for us.

3. Even among those who take loans, we’re forcing them to choose between a career they might want vs one they can afford. Would you rather have your doctor be the person who liked biology as a child or the one whose parents paid for the new library to get their kid in the college?