Cuomo w/Sanders unvails plain for tuition-free public higher education in NY

[Fight for Trump]

Communism.

[Fight for Trump]

Communism.

Same with free, public k-12, I presume?

You can't get a decent job in the next few decades if you don't have good education as we see more automation, robotics & what not. So many jobs will open up in robotics, automation, design.

If the US doesn't have take advantage now & get a good workforce, it will be difficult to compete with other countries.

Universal public education is not, and should not be about jobs. It should be about providing the necessary skills and knowledge for children to become independent adults who can participate in society. No, the current system does not serve that purpose well, but turning college into the new high school will only make the disconnect between public education's purpose and reality worse.

The four OECD countries with a higher percentage of college degree holders than the US are Canada, Japan, Israel and South Korea. All of them charge tuition fees at public colleges and none of them have student loan programs as expansive as the ones in the US. Abolishing tuition does not increase access or achievement, and only leads to "education inflation", excessive spending and high dropout rates.

[Fight for Trump]

It doesn't matter what you think public education and college should be about, what matters is what it is really about in the real world. Employers seek potential employees with the best education, skills, and experience. By basing access to those jobs on one's ability to pay, it establishes inequality of access that will deny access to upward mobility to countless individuals from lower and working class backgrounds. If you want to create a caste system and/or a rigid hierarchical class society, that's the best path towards achieving it.

In today's world of increasing complexity and knowledge based work, you have no choice but to acquire the highest level of education possible to have a competitive advantage in our economy. School, while ideally striving towards education for education's sake, must also equip students for the job market. Whether this is trade school or college should be up to the individual based on their interests and talents, not their ability to pay.

Reality disproves everything you say. Look at where the education systems of countries like France and Denmark fail and those of countries like the US and Israel succeed. America needs more freedom, not more bureaucracy.

[Fight for Trump]

This is a surprisingly cogent follow-up given that your initial comment came across as brain-dead trolling.

However, most of the worries that you outline here came about long ago:

• College has already been "turned into high school" in the sense that students face lowered academic expectations and frequently spend their first several semesters focusing on remedial coursework.
• Affordable, sustainable, and debt-free tuition would be better than the "free" tuition that the Cuomo plan purportedly offers to qualifying students.
• Drop-out rates at US colleges are shockingly and embarrassingly high, and cost inflation over the past several decades has been disastrous.

I agree.

Personally, I think that much of our higher education woes stem from the fact that every single facet of our society - government, businesses, parents, and students themselves - have abdicated so much of their responsibility and dumped it all on the education system, both K-12 and post-secondary. Why doesn't the AICPA train their own accountants after their undergraduate degree? Why do airline pilots need university degrees? How do CJ degrees make police better? Why do public-sector HR departments demand degrees to "check the box"? And most importantly - why do politicians and parents alike continue to perpetuate the lie that going to college entitles one to a "good" job?

The entire system is a bloated disaster with the wrong priorities. It needs to be blown up, but not to expand the system, but to reduce it to the size it should be.