Free tuition?

Topic for blog entry, as suggested by Kate on Facebook yesterday: "University tuition and why it should be free".

In some respects I am precisely the wrong person to ask for an opinion on this. I remain intensely cynical about university almost twenty years after dropping out of it. The reasons for my cynicism are legion, But the biggest has become a running tagline of mine over the years: tuition is far too high, since you shouldn't have to pay professors so much to read textbooks to you. Verbatim. Especially when you have to buy the textbooks, the prices of which are hideously inflated.
I've said that over and over, to varying degrees of online opprobrium. Yet no matter how many Reddit downvotes I garner for this sentiment, I'll keep repeating it, because it was my experience. Not just in one class, either. In most of them.
There was one class I took, "The Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Friendship". Bird course, right? Easy A? I initially selected this course just so I could rewrite a high school essay and get it (in effect) professionally critiqued. I had some odd thoughts on the subject. Still do, in fact. Many of them, Dear Reader, you have seen in this here Breadbin.
Anyway, it was a night class, 7 to 10 on Tuesdays, as I recall. The first Tuesday night I was sicker than the proverbial dog. Sore throat, aches, chills, you name it. The closer I got to the classroom, the sicker I felt. What to my wondering bleary eye should appear in that classroom but a syllabus. Syllabi, actually, a big pile of 'em, detailing absolutely everything relevant to that class. Readings. Assignments and due dates. The date, time, and location of the final exam. A note at the bottom to the effect that assignments could be handed into the professor's mailbox, and where exactly that mailbox was.
Yoink!
 I walked out of the classroom that first night having never actually seen the prof, When I was feeling better, I digested the goldmine of information. Armed with this, I had no reason to actually attend the class, and so I didn't. At all. Ever. I handed in my assignments, including that essay, on time; they were available for pickup two weeks later where I'd dropped them off (the syllabus helpfully informed me).
I went into that final exam having not the slightest clue what would be on it. I got a B-plus in that course. Oh, yeah, and my essay? An A-, but nothing written on it that my high school teacher hadn't already inscribed on the truncated edition three years prior.

That's obscene, you know. What I did shouldn't have been allowed. And yet I hear from my university-aged friends that it's so much better now (or worse, depending on your point of view). Syllabi for most courses are now posted online. Assignments are handed in online, graded, and returned to you online.

Well, shit. What's the point of university at all, then? I can do "online" from anywhere. For that matter, between Khan Academy, TED talks, and a host of other such resources, I could, with discipline, mine the minds of millions and come away with the equivalent of a degree in any number of fields. All for the low and dropping price of a broadband connection.
This is the medium term future of education...by medium-term, I mean "in the foreseeable future, but before the implants show up". Eventually, you'll be able to glean knowledge just by installing the relevant software into your neural system.

I may not agree with piracy, but I certainly understand the motto the pirates live by: "information wants to be free".

In several countries, including Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, tuition is already free. (Denmark even provides a monthly stipend to students). So it can be done: it is being done. All it takes is a wee paradigm shift: society needs to view free tuition as an investment worth making.

The consequence-obsessed bureaucrat in me would insist that a minimum GPA be maintained. Fall below that GPA and still graduate, you're on the hook for fifty percent of your educational costs. Drop out, and it's a hundred percent. (No penalty for changing programs within a year--many students realize early on that their chosen course of study isn't for them.)

I wish I'd been one of those many students. I took an English degree with no thought given to its pecuniary potential at all. People asked me what my major was, I said "English", and invariably they said "oh, so you want to be a teacher, then." The thought of teaching filled me with dread. Oh,  I felt then (and still do) that I could be a good teacher, perhaps even a great one. But only for students who wanted to learn. Which, in my experience, was very few of them.
In hindsight -- which is perfect, depending on the hind you've sighted -- what I should have done was follow my best friend Jason into a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. My life would look markedly different right now, let me tell you. But the thought never occurred to me coming out of high school. Why would it? I'd never even taken business anything in high school, whereas I knew I was pretty damned good at English. It all goes back to that tragic misconception I'd harboured about the purpose of school: not to learn, but to show off what you've learned.

I've been talking about arts degrees as if that's all there is in the world of education. The fact is, university itself is far from the be-all and end-all of education. An argument can be made, in many cases, for a college/trade school education providing a more relevant foundation for a career path. Certainly society needs more people in the trades. The pay's not bad, either. As skills go, a carpenter or electrician is better positioned than a guy like me, who can ask "would you like fries with that" twenty seven different ways.

Should trade school be free?

Unlike university, there are actual costs attached to college and trade school. The people teaching you have real world experience, and so their time is considerably more valuable than any university professor's (the majority of professors have little to no interest in teaching anything to anyone anyway). You can't do trade school online. Tools cost. I'd suggest that public-private partnerships might provide an income stream for some institutions (this diploma brought to you by deWalt?) I do think students in such schools should probably buy their own tools with their own money...pride of ownership and all that. But otherwise I see no reason to perpetuate the outdated stereotype that college is a second-class education.

I'm a big fan of incentives. I've often felt that aspiring doctors, for instance, should be eligible for a discount of up to 100% on their university expenses provided they are willing to, say, practice where they're needed. If tuition is free across the board, you lose that carrot...and so you'd have to resort to a stick instead: set up shop in Toronto instead of Timmins and we'll thwack you with forty thousand dollars in student debt. The system can be gamed. And I think it should be. Because information does long to be free.