The US version of "subsidized by the government" is that the government guarantees gigantic piles of money to be loaned to 18 year olds and then says they have to pay it back.
This tends to attract an enormous amount of non-education related work like loan servicing companies, bloated school administration, etc. Now schools mission is not just to educate it is to get a piece of that huge loan pie. It creates perverse incentives like universities competing on how fancy their dorms are or whatever meanwhile they are trying to drive down all costs like turning full time professors into part time employees who have to get second jobs to make ends meet. Kids become just loan delivery mechanisms to administration.
What a subsidy would be is just... giving the money directly to the schools. Like is done with high school.
> What a subsidy would be is just... giving the money directly to the schools. Like is done with high school.
How’s that working out for K-12? Baltimore spends over $20,000 per student on their schools—more than the US average, and significantly more than most developed countries—but their schools are awful. As I said, none of this is an issue of not throwing enough money at the problem.
This tends to attract an enormous amount of non-education related work like loan servicing companies, bloated school administration, etc. Now schools mission is not just to educate it is to get a piece of that huge loan pie. It creates perverse incentives like universities competing on how fancy their dorms are or whatever meanwhile they are trying to drive down all costs like turning full time professors into part time employees who have to get second jobs to make ends meet. Kids become just loan delivery mechanisms to administration.
What a subsidy would be is just... giving the money directly to the schools. Like is done with high school.