Posted on 04/19/2016 3:27:15 PM PDT by Nachum
This old video seemed quite appropriate to dust off with the resurgence of "free college" demands from the Left.
Back in 1985, a young David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, sat across from economist Milton Friedman and was schooled on why government-subsidized higher education is a bad idea. The video is courtesy of Liberty Pen.
Friedman set the stage for the debate involving Brooks and the other panelists:
The question I want to raise is whether those higher education expenditures are a justifiable activity of government and what there consequences are and whether they really are a desirable element of a welfare state.
Friedman said his answer is a simple, "No." He expounded by saying that the students that would typically benefit from government-subsidized college are middle and upper income groups while the burden to pay falls on everyone, but especially hard on the lower income groups that won't see the same benefits from the program.
Brooks agreed that the subsidies are "regressive and the wrong people are paying for it," but he went on to say that private entities should stay out of education because that puts a "price tag on knowledge."
"What are you so angry about?" Friedman interjected. "You mean to say that the graduates of colleges and universities don't use their capacities in the direction which is influenced by the incomes they can earn?"
Friedman wanted to know what Brooks has in mind with thinking that somehow a student's incentives will be different if the government is funding their education.
Brooks said:
People would, in effect, invest in me if I went to college. Somebody would say, "He's probably going to do well, so we'll pay him to go to college and then as he makes money, he'll pay us back."
(Excerpt) Read more at truthrevolt.org ...
Brooks was a putz then.. and still is.
Free college will just be another transfer payment avenue from the US taxpayer to left-wing educrats.
With all the nonsense being spewed of late by various candidates it’s worth spending some time listening to the great Milton Friedman. Thanks for posting!
bkmk
With all the nonsense being spewed of late by various candidates it’s worth spending some time listening to the great Milton Friedman. Thanks for posting!
To bad we can’t resurrect him and run him on the GOP ticket
The left wants every kid in college, because 90+ percent of them are ultra left indoctrination mills.
bfl
The “Big Education” cycle:
1) make massive amounts of borrowed funds available to students
2) schools raise prices to absorb funding
3) schools pay admins and profs excessive salaries
4) admins and profs donate to democrats
and repeat....
Well done !
(deadly accurate too........)
To me it seems obvious, but rarely talked about. The amounts of money in play are HUGE.
When I graduate from college, my tuition was 2700/yr
Today my school is 46,000
No fees
No room & board
60,000
And the school spends money like water.
College is nothing but a racket
Sub-prime mortgages again, only the use a diploma instead of a house : )
Obviously Brooks hasn’t learned a thing.
Yes indeed. I have had many conversations with liberals wherein I have asked them, if higher education is so important why is the cost of tuition to get into a good college prohibitively high? Obama lectures us about the cost of a college education being too high, yet Harvard sits on an endowment fund of billions. Those billions sure could provide education for a lot of people, couldn’t they? I ask them these things and 100 percent of the time the response I get is shrug and embarrassed smile. Another point I bring up to them is this constant yammering about how we are falling behind other countries in producing scientists and mathematicians, etc. But, for the most part, who is responsible for education? Government is. Pretty telling, isn’t it? Yet they want us to pump more billions into education. “Investing” in our future. But there is a flip side to an investment and that is a return on that investment. Unfortunately their return on an investment is more leftards.
Bfl
Modern colleges exist solely to provide jobs to unemployable people who majored in liberal ‘arts.’
That was an excellent video.
The main issue I have is that people who go to college do it for three reasons:
1.) They want to get educated to get a better job, make more money, or make a difference in the world. Either they pay for it, or their parents/scholarships pay for it.
2.) They don’t know what else they should be doing, and college is the next logical step in the progression, so it is what they do. Either they pay for it, or their parents/scholarships pay for it. In this case, usually they pay or their parents.
3.) They don’t want to really be there, but someone else is paying, so that is where they are. In this case it is their parents or some form of grants, but the key is, they don’t care.
Out of these three groups, which ones will best succeed in both college and life?
I submit that in most cases, it is group #1 by a wide margin, followed by a lesser degree by group #2, and in dead last by a wide margin is going to be group #3.
If people have a personal financial or emotional investment in learning, they are going to put in the work, stick with it when the going gets tough, and get through it.
If there is no personal stake in learning, it is like gambling with other people’s money. Some may succeed. Some won’t. Lots of money will be spent and wasted. In general, the overall level and quality of a college education will decrease, that is undeniable, because the classes will contain higher populations of unqualified, unmotivated students, and only two things can happen: The entire class slows down, or the professors don’t care and simply forge on and pass everyone, and again, the education means nothing.
(Note this is ALL independent of whether this should even be done at all...which is shouldn’t.)
Lastly, institutions will be beholden to the government dole. They will be forced to to the government line (which most of them are going to do anyway)
Can someone even remind me why this discussion is taking place? Oh, that’s right. Liberals love the idea, because it means more government control of more things. And as you accurately state, most of these places are breeding grounds for what you call “Leftards”.
Thank you both for your thoughtful comments.
I agree with your points.
Full disclosure for me-I did use the G.I. Bill after I got out of the Navy, and I did go to a state college, but I feel differently about those types of benefits.
I believe that if we are asking people to lay their lives on the line for us, benefits such as the G.I. Bill are the least we can do to help compensate for things we may never be able to give them back.
I still believe that the G.I. Bill was one of the Best uses of taxpayer money when it was provided to all of our servicemen after World War II… I do believe that we as a nation reaped a great deal of benefit from that.
I can easily see a liberal like David Brooks saying to me “what would be the difference between the G.I. Bill and providing higher education to everybody for free.
I would say that we owed it to those men, and it work because they were all highly motivated.
The GI Bill today is massive waste of money. Friedman was right: Free means low quality. The WORST students I see today are the GI Bill students. They get low grades, rarely attend class, and only do what they must to stay good with the VA so they can stay in school. They are rarely even remotely qualified to be in the degree programs they are in, but, schools love that VA money so they lower entrance standards to get them in.
I was one of the last ones in under the old GI Bill. I don’t know anything about what you said, so I have to trust you on that.
But I know it was a real boon to me, Vietnam, Korea, and WWII vets.
When I heard what the new G.I. Bill was like, it sounded like it sucked.
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