Quote:
Originally Posted by Caltex
Yes society benefits as well, but not nearly as much as that individual. The societal benefit from someone having a college education versus not is on average a small amount. Thus many states and nations do put a value on that and subsidize education some, to pay for that benefit. But there is no way that benefit is worth 100% subsidizing that education.
Everyone goes through primary education at some point in their life, so everyone (minus those that go to private school) get an equal benefit out of 100% subsidized primary education, as well as the side benefits of a more advance society. Only around 25% of the population (At least in the U.S) will get a college degree.
It's not fair to charge others to completely pay for your education. There is no way they will ever benefit from it as much as you do, thus they are in turn being taxed unfairly.
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I don't agree with this idea that the impact on society isn't that great.
For instance you are likely to earn 400,000, over a lifetime, more as a University Graduate then not in the UK, according to Government figures. If you take the standard 35% cut of the UK Government, you arrive at a figure of 140,000 extra tax paid by that individual. Given a cost of about 30k for the education, which is at the very extreme end of the cost, this person would pay for his own education plus the education of 3 more people, and a little extra, and all the tax a non-university person paid, plus he would have more money going into the economy to keep it healthy.
I would also say that this is a major problem with both the UK and the US. We both have really appalling education systems. We just are not willing to put the money where it needs to be. We are not willing to make the tough choices when it comes to education.
We both have terrible apathy with our youth, raising violent crime, massive prison populations. We both have terrible endemic crime and poverty. In our country I know we have what we term 'generational unemplyed' people whose parents have never worked, their grandparents have never worked, they have never worked and they don't expect their children to work.
We clearly don't put enough store in education and it is reflected in our populations. Instead of facing the larger issue, we instead spend far more then we would need to on raising education standards, on crime prevention, welfare costs, policing and prison etc etc.
We could take a fraction of the amount budgeted to deal with these issues and direct it towards free education.
Though I really do think at least in the UK that the people running our education system need to be removed and we need a new order in our education system as the current system is appalling. It isn't about tweaking it here or there, it is about dismantling completely our education system and recreating it to be better then it is right now.