I said this here recently, but I think it bears repeating:
When I attended the University of California at Berkeley in the fun 1960's, there was no tuition for in-state students. Zero. There were 27,000 students at that time just at that one campus.
It would be hard to quantify the return on investment to the taxpayers, but free quality higher education must have contributed to the thriving California economy and culture.
There's been a general decline in California's willingness to fund the UC system, which is mostly what ended that. Surprisingly, the UC system doesn't seem to have had significant cost-per-student growth (unlike many universities), so it should still be able to provide free education if it were funded at the same levels as in the '60s. But it isn't: adjusted for inflation and population, it's had about 50-70% of its support cut compared to the peak years (depending on what you take as a starting point), which has been mostly made up for by tuition. Partly also by expanding cash-cow programs, like professional masters programs, and by admitting a smaller proportion of in-state students, since out-of-state students pay much higher tuition.
I collected some numbers on that a few years ago: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt. That table shows total and per-student support; the latter is partly impacted by the growth in student numbers. But if you convert the numbers for each year to percent of state GDP, or support per resident, there's a large decline in those terms as well (in GDP terms, from roughly 0.3% to 0.1%).
Interestingly there's no real correlation between partisan politics and the numbers. Funding was generally high under both Republican and Democratic administrations in earlier years, and has been cut under both administrations in more recent years. My guess is that as a "discretionary" line in the budget the UC is just relatively easy to chop, when someone making up a budget needs to close some holes, so it ended up bearing the brunt of the recent budget crisis that was caused by other parts of the budget.
> My guess is that as a "discretionary" line in the budget the UC is just relatively easy to chop, when someone making up a budget needs to close some holes, so it ended up bearing the brunt of the recent budget crisis that was caused by other parts of the budget.
More like, it came down to cutting education, cutting pensions, or cutting healthcare spending. This is a problem across the entire country, but California has more generous pension and healthcare promises, so the problem is especially acute there.
Guess I contributed to one of those cash-cow programs when the Bank of America sent me back to get an MBA in Finance in the evening "executive" program. So maybe in the end, I was a net wash for my alma mater.
I live in Québec and we have extremely low tuition fees. A 3 years program in any university will be around $1500CAD per semester, so $9000 in total. There are some variations between different universities, but of a few hundreds dollars only. It is the same tuition fee for engineering programs, political science or med school.
When my province came out of what we call the Révolution tranquille (Quiet Revolution), we had one of the lowest postsecondary education population rate in Canada. By creating a bunch of public universities with extremely low tuition fee, we have a whole different picture 40 years later with a well educated population.
That's not too terribly different from a lot of places in the US. Tuition for in-state students at public universities can run $2,000 to $3,000 USD per semester, and every penny (and then some extra) is covered by unsubsidized student loans which reasonable interest rates. After getting a 4 year degree, tuition did nothing to my pocket book and roughly 6 months after graduation I had to start paying $140/month, which is a tiny, especially in comparison to the higher salaries I got after graduation.
Without assuming too much, I'm not certain when you went to school, based on those numbers it seems a while ago.
2013-2014, average in-state tuition for 4-year public universities is just over 5,000 per semester, and that DOESN'T include housing, meals, books and other incidentals - it assumes you only pay for classes, nothing else.
Wyoming was the lowest average in 2013-14, at $4,404 for the year (2202 per semester), and under $9,000 when you include housing and meal plan - not bad, really.
Anymore, even with Pell, state grants and federal subsidized loans, students still have to come up with 1,000-3,000 per semester. So, that's where the unsubsidized and parent plus loans come in.
Source - my own institutional research at a community college for the last two years.
The main difference is that in Québec, tuition for all Universities is around that much. Tuition for a BA at McGill is $2,282.10 per year for local students, and McGill is arguably either the best or second-best school nationally.
For comparison, U of T in Ontario comes to around $6,000 p.a., or $13,000 for Engineering.
Ronald Reagan did that (sigh). For anyone curious about why college tuition hurts the economy in the long run, it has to do with endowments. The idea is that it's more productive to pay during and after a career (when one has money) than before a career (when one is broke). Long term thinking like this built American into an industrial superpower, but short term thinking is giving us.. well, something else.
For example, land grant colleges were set up so that farming profits paid for the next generation's education. We've largely replaced that with student-loan debt based education, which sets graduates back for years or even decades. Now we have a stagnant economy where most people are struggling to get by instead of making meaningful contributions that increase their wealth and ability to pay/donate down the road. The founding fathers knew why public education was so important, yet at every turn we see people constantly attempting to privatize and marginalize it. It frankly disgusts me, which I know I’m not supposed to say on HN, but there it is.
I don't have an opinion on funding through land grants, but your narrative leaves out the rising cost of tuition and the California's immense budget problems (which are mainly responsible for the cuts to education).
It's so sad that the generation that benefited from the free/low tuition is the same one that has voted it out of existence for the next generation. Just another example of the boomers pulling up the ladder behind them. Their stories of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps generally leave out the free world-class education.
It would be hard to quantify the return on investment to the taxpayers, but free quality higher education must have contributed to the thriving California economy and culture.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7013042