Higher education: Should it be a government entitlement or a personal investment? This is a question that keeps surfacing during my studies at Oxford, because here tuition is paid not by the students and their families, but by the government. In fact, every student at every university in Great Britain has his or her tuition paid for by federal grants.
The only fees that British students must pay are for utilities, room and board which add up to approximately $1,500 per term, totaling at most only $4,500 per year. Even if that is a conservative estimate, if you contrast that figure with Duke's combined fees of approximately $30,000 per year (give or take a few thousand), you have to sit back and think hard about the answer to my initial question.
Free access to higher education sounds like an excellent idea in theory. Regardless of an individual's socio-economic status, the formidable money barrier crumbles at the feet of a country willing to use its tax revenue to subsidize its children's university education. Immense debts from college loans are virtually non-existent and the nation's economic gap between the rich and poor starts to narrow, for the poor can afford to be as educated as the rich.
So if it's such a good idea, why hasn't the United States chosen to imitate Great Britain? Why can't we all go to Duke for free, or at least for a fraction of the absurdly high tuition we currently pay?
The answer may lie partially in the two nations' underlying socio-political philosophies: Put simply, the citizens of Great Britain prefer a much larger welfare state than Americans do; their universal health care and fully subsidized college education are two good examples. Even more apparent is that Americans hate the words "higher tax rates," which is exactly what we would need to finance such an enormous endeavor.
In addition to the financial reality behind universal access to college, there is an intuition behind our American ideology that makes quite a bit of sense: Why should taxpayers, many of whom do not have college degrees themselves, pay for someone else's higher education? According to the myriad statistics indicating that people with college degrees make more money, it seems unfair to mandate that taxpayers who are without this degree pay for someone else's path to a higher income bracket.
The premise behind education as entitlement becomes even weaker when one realizes that many of the students attending universities for free are more than able to pay for part, if not all, of it on their own. I don't care what political philosophy prevails in a given society, nobody ever seems to like the rich, so I can't imagine why taxpayers would want to subsidize a wealthy child's already promising future. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the United States has instituted a system of financial aid that is inversely proportional to a family's income instead of dishing out as much as people want to take.
It appears, though, that the British government is slowly beginning to realize some of the aforementioned issues, and it is taking substantial steps to divert the burden of educational costs onto the student.
Recently, the Labour party announced that it is will require all British students to pay $1,600 tuition next year. The government may also scrap the extra $2,800 grant that it gives to Cambridge and Oxford students in order to fund their tutorial-based system of teaching. Although the former measure will affect only the students, the latter measure will directly hurt Britain's two best universities because the absence of this extra funding, which is strictly for colleges, will force some schools to file for bankruptcy-including the one at which I am studying.
And apparently these two educational reforms are only the beginning, for the British government is about to face the grim reality of a large baby boom generation getting ready to retire. The consequence: While social security payments skyrocket, an increasing percentage of tuition fees will have to be footed by the students. Perhaps my initial question has distinct answer after all-looks like the British better re-evaluate their investments.
Rod Feuer is a Trinity junior.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.