I’m going to suggest a different take on this. I can only speak to my field, medicine. Having a huge undergrad debt load will absolutely affect the future choices made. Subsidizing pre-med is not popular, because surgeons make bank. Pediatricians and family docs do not. At all. But we all have to get the same undergrad education. 6-figure student debt just for undergrad will pretty much rule out pursuing primary care careers. Just cannot afford it. Also, (and this is gonna be opinion, no research to my knowledge to back this up) primary care is a field where having a liberal arts background really helps, dealing with different cultures, backgrounds, belief systems and being able to meet them on some sort of semi-common ground makes the relationship much more successful and productive. Also, IMHO, liberal arts classes are more likely to attract a variety of students, allowing interaction with folks from different backgrounds that you might not meet in normal life. I feel like it made a huge difference for me. Of course, I also paid nothing for college because I could swim pretty fast. “And that has made all the difference.”
I never said that we can’t fund higher education in a more equitable and inclusive way. I am however interested in exploring why we don’t.
Certainly the decrease in the percentage of the costs running an institution of higher learning that are covered by public funding are why a greater percentage of the costs are now covered by tuition and other fees. But they aren’t really what has allowed the costs per student to provide that education to rise as quickly as they have. Even with less funding from the government, the costs of providing that education have risen. And what has allowed the price charged to go up much faster than the general rate of inflation is the availability of funds and the willingness of lenders to lend that money. Merely putting more public funds in won’t fix a problem that has been driven by the availability of too much loaned money. The administrators of higher education are like the people running most organizations, if you make more money available to them, they will find a way to spend it. To think that giving them more public money without lowering the amount of money that bankers are willing to lend students will result lower tuition is a bit naïve, I think.
Necessary, but not sufficient.
Absolutely. But then I never claimed that this was inevitable. We all make choices, both individually and collectively. Trying to figure out why we make the choices that we do and how those individual choices add up to collective ones that few of us actually seem to want is one of the things that a well-rounded education is supposed to allow us to do. In a broader sense, just because one looks at that through an economic lens is NOT to ascribe any kind of moral or inevitable value to that analysis. Indeed we can, should and arguably must do something when economic forces result in things that we do not want.
I got into a fairly ugly argument with my Ayn Randian sister over this very topic. Her position is that the reason college costs have risen so much is that government funds pouring out to allow folks who “have no place in higher education” to afford to go, “thinking they can rise above their station.” If we just cut the needs-based scholarships, costs would drop because only the wealthy could afford to send their kids to college. (???) This from a woman who, like all 4 of us siblings, went to school on full scholarships. I will give you one guess which sorts of folks she believes “have no place in higher ed.” It’s really sad, she was a liberal democrat until she married a proto-trumpian lawyer. 
Not just public universities. Mount Saint Mary’s, a private college in Maryland recently went through a nasty internal fight when they brought in an alum and former businessman to run it. The result was a greater emphasis on career training and a lower emphasis on its mission as a Catholic school. In a broader sense the “cult of management” has been ruining many companies (eg Boeing) just as it has infected higher ed.
It’s like an inoculation against fascism.
News Journalism was my liberal arts degree, predicated on my childhood love of Barbara Walters, Connie Chung and later a fervor for Terry Gross. I took a wide variety of courses, minored in history and studied abroad. Upon graduation I worked at a newspaper where I promptly had my first big human interest feature story hijacked by a misogynist bureau chief who slapped his name on the by-line and put mine at the end as a “contributor”. I found better work teaching Engrish in Japan then profitable work at a startup drafting business plans and later tech writing and much more. These twists and turns were facilitated by a liberal arts degree that emphasized critical thinking and broad mindedness. Everyone who passed through my school that I remained friends with are social Democrats / Progressive.
Oddly (or not) the people I knew who studied engineering and eschewed the liberal arts almost to a person went on to be conservative. Two of the Americans from then are now quietly MAGA. One future republican was a close college friend, an androgynous boy with Flock of Seagulls hair and a great wardrobe who got his degree in Civil Engineering. Years later he panned journalists as “not knowing how to do things, they just write without knowing much”. Our falling out was painful, he couldn’t possibly understand the value of journalism in Democracy.
Even attending university isn’t an inoculation if your degree wasn’t in the liberal arts.
The reason for skyrocketing tuition costs are due to decades of cuts to public university subsidies and the availability of cheap predatory credit to cover the shortfall.
Ivy League schools tended to have the most gradual tuition hikes compared to state/local colleges, small private schools due to generous alum funding and legacy admissions
I believe that education is a good thing for everyone. It raises the ethical standards of the people who get it. It should be provided free by the state to anyone capable of getting to whatever level they max out at. If some degrees are likely to lead to higher salaries, that individual benefit can be addressed by higher taxation of higher salaries.
I was required to take more science and math courses in college than in high school, and I was an English major. And the science majors were required to take years of Humanities, social science, foreign language, and history courses.
That’s a liberal arts education.
ETA: here ya go, @Scientist:
Yes, that’s pretty much my point. Higher education is just one of the things that is being negatively affected by the swollen size of Wall Street compared to the “real” parts of the economy, where people make and provide goods and services. Too much money looking for a place to land also destroyed the housing market between 2003 and 2008 and continues to keep house prices too high. Even stock prices are so high that they can only be seen as based on speculation that prices will be even higher in the future rather than the current value of future dividends.
As Mindaysan33 says, none of this in inevitable, it is about the collective results of the choices that we have made. What we need to do is figure out exactly which choices have gotten us here, where we would rather be, and how to get there, considering the vested interests which will seek to prevent any change in the status quo.
I wouldn’t say that this was the result of any kind of end goal, but the problems of today have a way of drowning out any worries about where the path we are on is headed. When you’re trying to meet payroll and keep the lights on and the roof watertight, it is difficult to worry about the long term implications of where exactly funding is coming from and what that implies about an organizations mission.
We should make college free. We should subsidize it, like we should subsidize health care and housing. Because it’s the right thing to do. The no one would need to depend on private, predatory lending (which is in part due to the end of New Deal era regulations around lending). Everyone should be able to get an education as far as they like. It’s a basic human right that we should all share the burden of, because everyone getting an education benefits all of society. 
Then you don’t have to mess around with loans or working all summer or anything else. JUST LET PEOPLE GET AN EDUCATION…
This isn’t really that difficult, but since in this stupid country, we can’t imagine building a society that is built on basic human decency, we believe we can’t do stuff like this. We can and we should.
Private universities should be made public, and people should be able to go to them for free.
Just… make it all free! Tax the shit out of the rich and use it to subsidize public higher ed!
Yes. It was. It was to get women and POC out of the university and return it to the domain of white men.
When you have an uneducated population of dumbbells, democracy is weakened. That’s exactly how a Trump-type takes over. That’s why right-wingers are so opposed to education.
For fascists, ignorance is knowledge. (Nothing, is everything you need to know.)
The usual saying is: “Knowledge is power, that’s why they don’t want you to have any.”
Every liberal arts degree I’ve seen includes sciences in this and requires some science education
For some definition of “science education”. I’ve TAed these sorts of “Biology and You” courses for non-majors that were required for many undergraduates when I was in grad school. They were shallow to the point of being useless and maybe even worse than useless because they didn’t explain how biology knows what it knows and made biology look like a series of random facts rather than a way of thinking.
Who was it that made that course “a series of random facts rather than a way of thinking”? My guess would be the biology department.
I taught intro bio for non-science majors at a large state school. As a TA each week I gave one lecture and ran 2 lab sessions. It was an ok class if the TA was good, but very low on the biology department’s list of priorities, and they didn’t much care if the TAs were good.
I always took that as a reflection of the biology department’s disinterest in liberal arts education rather than liberal arts’ disinterest in science. In my experience students and academics from other fields are eager to learn more about science. They just check out if it becomes an exercise in learning random facts rather than about understanding the world around them
Admittedly the lowest common denominator for most fields of study is “a series of random facts…”
Edited to add: and the pressure to do that comes to instructors from above (educational standards and the tests they spawn) and below “Will this be on the test?”
Which is to say, badly? We do a FAR better job of subsidizing education than either health care or housing in the U.S. Education through 12th grade is free for all. The quality is highly variable depending on where you live, but the large number of homeless in this country suggest that our subsidizing of housing is very ineffective at ensuring that everyone can get a least a minimum level of housing. We pay more for worse outcomes in health care than any other industrialized country. Yes, medicaid does sort of set a minimum standard of care, but the health care system will attempt to milk you dry before that kicks in. The large percentage of bankruptcies driven by medical debt is again evidence that we do those very poorly.
Are you really suggesting that people should not be free to found colleges and universities? While I am no fan of places like Liberty University or Bringham Young and am quite skeptical of the quality of education that they provide, I do not believe that they should be nationalized and made public.
At least we have some agreement here, although I think that we need to tax the wealthy more heavily simply because wealth is becoming too concentrated, the wealthy too powerful, and that is bad for our democracy. Not because we need the money to do this or that.
I think that you will find that the bursers and banksters are just as happy to soak it women and POC and leaving them deeply in debt as white men.
You know, I thought that we were talking past each other and I was not explaining myself well, but it is evident that we have profoundly different views.
Oh no that shit. Not that “government is the problem shit”… I just can’t with that. Private industry, which ONLY cares about making money is patently worse. In housing, in health care, in education. What is happening is the results of several decades of the GOP tearing down new deal institutions and handing them over to private interests. That’s a major reason why homelessness is on the rise (destruction of public housing in favor of section 8 vouchers and tax breaks for building affordable housing, and waves of corporations buying up housing stock after the 2008 crash - again, caused not by public ownership of housing, but by market speculation). An unregulated market sucks at providing the basics of what we all need to live comfortably in a society. There really isn’t much to debate about that anymore, because it’s been largely proven true by this point.
That’s because of HOW MUCH of that has been taken over by private equity!
You mean the for-profit healthcare system? That “superior” system?
That’s because most health care is run by private corporations. Most other western countries don’t have this problem because they don’t let corporations profit off people’s illnesses the way that we do. You know, because they understand just how morally repugnant it is.
So we should just let anyone start a university? Trump maybe?
But we do. what do you suggest, that we tax the rich and do nothing with it? continue to let shit fall apart?
WTF does that mean? I mean part of the reason why academia has been under attack is due to the number of women and POC who are there now.
That’s a major leap from what she’s calling for. Again, other OECD countries subsidise or cover tuition (and sometimes more) at all accredited universities, whether they’re operated by the state or private institutions. It’s not The Road to Serfdom, it’s just how an advanced economy ensures it has an educated citizenry.
They could still operate under such a system in the U.S., but due to the Establishment Clause they wouldn’t get government funding like schools without explicitly religious missions.
And yeah, liberty fucking university should be shut down, because it’s feeding a right wing pipeline of figures seeking to overthrow the god damn government. As far as I know, other private universities, like Emory or even BYU aren’t engaged in similiar pursuits.
And don’t get defrauded in the process… look at how much damage all those for-profit colleges have done. If the government had not stepped in to forgive loans to people attending these “colleges”, things would be much worse with our student debt crisis.
