My intuition is that higher education should be free at point of use, as lower education is, and that to a first order approximation we want to maximize the amount of it. I suspect the externalities created by a person learning something are strongly positive and much larger than the cost of teaching it to them or the amount of that value from knowing it that they personally would realistically be able to capture.
Some of this comes from improvements to coordination capacity. If, for example, everyone goes to college math class and learns linear algebra, then everyone gets some benefit from being able to use linear algebra, when they encounter a matching problem. But if everyone knows that everyone else knows linear algebra, then linear algebra gets to go into the pool of “common knowledge” that powers social coordination. The more we know we know, the more we can be on the same page.
Some of this also comes from specialization. Having people out there who have the knowledge and skills to do things I don’t is good for me in ways I am never actually going to pay them for. I might pay the salaries of, say, epidemiologists, through taxes, but I am never going to give them even a substantial fraction of the value I get from not dying constantly from infectious disease, so the amount available from their earnings to pay for their education is artificially low compared to how many of them we want.
Funding education with personal loans makes sense if education is meant to produce earners. But I see education as meant to produce people and societies. It is only at that level that the full benefit of education is seen, even for specialties that manage to capture a lot of value, and it is at that level that the benefits of, say, English majors are really delivered.
First best would be, anyone can walk into any college, sit down, and start learning stuff for free, with a framework of course requirements and degree granting to provide the gamification to encourage this, and with their needs for pedestrian things such as food, housing, and health care provided for. If that doesn’t produce enough education of the right types on its own, we might have to start paying people to go to school.
The loan forgiveness two-step is obviously much more complex, for no real benefit, so it’s strictly worse. But even to the extent that it’s just public spending on people who went to college, it seems better than not doing it. Especially if it changes behavior to result in more total education happening.
The degree to which it helps universities grow unboundedly wasteful is bad. But universities have already been growing almost unboundedly wasteful without the help of loan forgiveness, so if we really want to address that problem we need to redesign how they work, rather than just restricting the blood supply to the educational organ to starve the tumor. If we could actually put $200,000 worth of education into everyone’s head, and not just spend that while educating them, we’d be living in a paradise of abundant expertise.
Funding education with personal loans makes sense if education is meant to produce earners. But I see education as meant to produce people and societies.
What metrics do you think we could use to measure whether college education actually produces people and societies?
There’s a lot of money involved into spreading the meme that this is what happens but I haven’t seen any good evidence for that claim.
It is only at that level that the full benefit of education is seen, even for specialties that manage to capture a lot of value, and it is at that level that the benefits of, say, English majors are really delivered.
How do you know that English majors produce a lot of value for society?
My intuition is that higher education should be free at point of use, as lower education is, and that to a first order approximation we want to maximize the amount of it. I suspect the externalities created by a person learning something are strongly positive and much larger than the cost of teaching it to them or the amount of that value from knowing it that they personally would realistically be able to capture.
Some of this comes from improvements to coordination capacity. If, for example, everyone goes to college math class and learns linear algebra, then everyone gets some benefit from being able to use linear algebra, when they encounter a matching problem. But if everyone knows that everyone else knows linear algebra, then linear algebra gets to go into the pool of “common knowledge” that powers social coordination. The more we know we know, the more we can be on the same page.
Some of this also comes from specialization. Having people out there who have the knowledge and skills to do things I don’t is good for me in ways I am never actually going to pay them for. I might pay the salaries of, say, epidemiologists, through taxes, but I am never going to give them even a substantial fraction of the value I get from not dying constantly from infectious disease, so the amount available from their earnings to pay for their education is artificially low compared to how many of them we want.
Funding education with personal loans makes sense if education is meant to produce earners. But I see education as meant to produce people and societies. It is only at that level that the full benefit of education is seen, even for specialties that manage to capture a lot of value, and it is at that level that the benefits of, say, English majors are really delivered.
First best would be, anyone can walk into any college, sit down, and start learning stuff for free, with a framework of course requirements and degree granting to provide the gamification to encourage this, and with their needs for pedestrian things such as food, housing, and health care provided for. If that doesn’t produce enough education of the right types on its own, we might have to start paying people to go to school.
The loan forgiveness two-step is obviously much more complex, for no real benefit, so it’s strictly worse. But even to the extent that it’s just public spending on people who went to college, it seems better than not doing it. Especially if it changes behavior to result in more total education happening.
The degree to which it helps universities grow unboundedly wasteful is bad. But universities have already been growing almost unboundedly wasteful without the help of loan forgiveness, so if we really want to address that problem we need to redesign how they work, rather than just restricting the blood supply to the educational organ to starve the tumor. If we could actually put $200,000 worth of education into everyone’s head, and not just spend that while educating them, we’d be living in a paradise of abundant expertise.
What metrics do you think we could use to measure whether college education actually produces people and societies?
There’s a lot of money involved into spreading the meme that this is what happens but I haven’t seen any good evidence for that claim.
How do you know that English majors produce a lot of value for society?