wait, so how do we do this higher education thing right, anyways?

free tuition is the way to go, but we won't have to worry about how to pay for it if we just only let the best students in. all of the bloat comes in when you try and convert a university into a holding ground for underachieving adults. but, the market is really a terrible way to determine criteria to enter a classroom, anyways. first, we need to get the standards up a little, then we need to make access dependent solely on ability to succeed, not on ability to pay.

i guess you can't stop private universities from charging tuition, but, ideally, the public system would be where all of the research funding would be handed out through and all the best students would go - enough that paying to go to school would basically be proof that you're a loser, because you can't get into the free schools. this really ought to be turned on it's head...

when you let the elite institutions be privately run, and the less than elite institutions be publicly run, what the private institutions end up doing is twofold: (1) they take legacy money in terms of grants, in order to tolerate the children of alumni and (2) they use that legacy money to fund scholarships. this is just wasteful, on all kinds of different levels. free from the need to take bribes, the government would be far more efficient at ensuring that the classrooms at the elite institutions are only staffed with the best students. an integrated system could and really should try and combine campuses, as well - it would make sense to have regional physics institutes, for example, rather than a physics department in every city.

but, i'm missing the point about how university is necessary to find employment and so should be covered by public education. except that i'm not. what i'd actually like to see is another 2-4 years of high school, as that is a better way to address that problem than opening up universities to free tuition. there's a lot of things that high school does not address, from basic sciences to statistics to computer programming to business management, that ought to be a part of a basic education, rather than specialized knowledge. that is, after all, what people like senator sanders are really saying, isn't it? that you don't get out of the general pool with (most) two or even a four year degrees nowadays, because you're not learning anything that most people don't learn at some point, anyways.

the universities would need to shift their four year programs, if everybody walks in knowing a year or two of calculus, a year or two of stats, introductory quantum physics, how to program in C and java....but they could just pull graduate level courses down into the four year program and introduce even more abstract courses at the graduate level.

but, it should be free once you get there. if you can get there.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.