
Tuning In to Dropping Out - Which educations to subsidize - FluidDjango
http://chronicle.com/article/Tuning-In-to-Dropping-Out/130967/
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tokenadult
From the article: "The focus on college education has distracted government
and students from apprenticeship opportunities. Why should a major in English
literature be subsidized with room and board on a beautiful campus with
Olympic-size swimming pools and state-of-the-art athletic facilities when
apprentices in nursing, electrical work, and new high-tech fields like
mechatronics are typically unsubsidized (or less subsidized)? College students
even get discounts at the movie theater; when was the last time you saw a
discount for an electrical apprentice?"

That's a really good question. Back when I pursued my undergraduate degree
(majoring in a modern foreign language), the state university's budget and
sources of revenue were such that students paid about one-third of the cost of
their educations through tuition payments. (That percentage has since
increased for undergraduates at my alma mater, and of course this leaves aside
the issue of who is subsidizing the students' tuition payments.) State
appropriations funded by all taxpayers in my state paid for about another
third of the university's undergraduate education expenses. (This percentage
has decreased since I graduated.) Federal and private grants and all other
sources of university income paid for the other third. (The university has
since become better at private fund-raising--I get fund-raising telephone
calls all the time as an alumnus--and a little better at licensing inventions
and the like, but I think has a lower percentage of direct federal grants than
it did when I was a student.) If a college education returns economic benefits
to a student, and that is the usual claim, why doesn't the student just time-
shift those economic returns by attending college with student loans? What is
the rationale for public subsidies for university studies, and does that
rationale suggest that other forms of studying should also be subsidized? Does
that rationale suggest that different college major subjects ought to be
subsidized at different levels of subsidy?

