Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

Awesome. Now let’s lower the bar further and do it everywhere. And then let’s keep doing more until students can pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.

I’ll hold off on asking for higher education to be free, as the culture still pushes back on that. But a return to the former model would be most welcome.

Why not be more ambitious and aim for free?

Won’t happen as long as the govt is giving out free loans, which is the driver of increasing tuition prices.

It is difficult to enact meaningful change in a country that doesn't see supporting its people as an investment in itself. Discussing the price when it should be free is a distraction.

Clearly nothing to do with inefficient administration, then. Here in Australia, where a friend's wife works as the PA for the Dean in one of our foremost universities, and I know numerous lecturers, some of whom are moving overseas for better opportunities (in Southeast Asia of all places!), the faculty-members-over-beer perspective is largely that the universities are head-in-sand about AI and about to become far less relevant. IMHO MIT OCW is great, we need more of that, and more mini-courses.

I was going to comment that free loans and inefficient/outsized admin go hand-in-hand. On further thinking if you take away the loans, the admin has no choice but to shrink and achieve higher efficiencies.

It's never going to happen in a country where politicians try to convince people that college education == elitism, and a significant part of the population actually believes that

As far as I know, and countries where tuition is free entrance is restricted and the students do not expect to live the United States university lifestyle.

Free would be fine if we could expect actual return on the investment instead of extended high school, delaying adulthood, and channeling people from useful vocations within their grasp.

I'd like to see a future where a student can have free tuition but (with exception) is required do meaningful civic service work that benefits the community and country that is paying for tuition, ultimately graduating with zero debt if requirements are met.

Maintaining national parks? Helping support inner city? Tutoring and improving public education? Imagine having the majority of American college students contributing to these worthy causes AND getting a strong education.

I tried to check if that was true, but couldn't find much historical tuition data online. What little I did find showed that tuition adjusted for inflation has been increasing fairly steadily for over 100 years, and I didn't really see any change in the rates between before government loans and after.

Maybe if I had found data for a wide range of schools instead of just a couple of hard to get into schools there would have been a more noticeable effect.

Doesn't the federal government already do this? Work for them 10 years and student debt is cancelled?

This is basically the point of PSLF[0]. The cost to participants is not $0, but it can ultimately be very low if they only make income adjusted payments during their 10 years of service.

https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation...

Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs? College enrollment percentage? What about a near universal military draft for men?

Not that I think lowering the cost of education is a bad effort but appeals to some prior culture like they are apples to apples comparison is dishonest.

I think they are suggesting that you would graduate debt free for having done service while getting your education

And the classrooms should be an easy stroll from the dorms, downhill, both ways.

> Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs?

Yes, please. Students learned just fine without all the fancy facilities. Perks are great and all, but I would trade them for a low cost of education in a second.

The university’s would argue that the students voted with their feet, and that those facilities are an arms race that if you lose you lose students.

I do t know that they are disinterested parties in this that can be trusted uncritically but there is a community college near me that has nicer gym facilities for their students than my big 10 Alma matter had for its “student” athletes when I was in school. Something drives that.

>> pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.

or like it is currently for EU citizens in any EU country. Americans are getting ripped off from all sides.

In the former model, which I also would love to back to, college was cheap because the government didn't keep inflating the price with huge loans, coupled with every adult in range telling kids that the HAVE to go to college and the more prestigious the better.

Get rid of government loans, bring us back to how universities used to operate, and education will once again be something you can pay for with a summer job.

All we're doing with these government loans is transferring the wealth of society to the universities.

But how would you have time to study full time and work full time?