The biggest problem is the fundamental inability of two higher education camps: "education should be free" and "education should be market priced" to agree on anything.
It would be better to have a mix: free education slots for students who pass (tough-ish) entrance exams and slots that university can add at market price for students who do not meet the bar. If there are more market price applications than slots schools can select any way they want except on price (i.e., all market rate slots should be priced the same). My 2c.
"It would be better to have a mix: free education slots for students who pass (tough-ish) entrance exams and slots that university can add at market price for students who do not meet the bar."
We already have this on a small scale and in niches. Scholarships are essentially giving free or reduced cost slots to performance graded people. Then we have other free (or later forgiven) slots based on service, such as GI bill and teach for America, etc. There are all sorts of ways to get free/reduced/forgiven tuition if it's important enough to someone.
The bigger problem is the marketing and credentialing. Companies want credentials, schools want students, and so it's sold from multiple angles as the necessary thing to do for a good job. We end up with people getting junk degrees to work gate-kept jobs for low wages. Or they can't even get a job in their field.
Clearly the market is broken, but free tuition isn't going to fix the problems either.
I don't think the market is broken, I do think it has been heavily distorted by government intervention though. I think you are correct that credentialism is a problem here. For those who suggest free tuition for everyone (government funded), I would ask how that would solve this particular problem. It seems like it would worsen this problem and probably lead to an even larger shortage of people going in the trades.
I would consider distortion at this magnitude to be broken. It's pretty much stuck in a vicious cycle of number of degrees increasing from accessibility, businesses increasing demand for credentials because there are more of them, demand for easy loans increasing, etc. It would take a monumental shift to fix this from multiple areas of society.
The problem with scholarships is that the criteria is not clear and selection is (at least seen as being) at a whim of whoever is in charge at the moment.
Merit slots, given via clear exams, give everyone a good idea of whether they are likely to get in or not, for example by doing practice tests and looking at passing scores from previous years.
If those merit slots are limited (just due to the facility and staff limits they would need to be), then you will run into the same scenario. It will become competitive without a strict standard required. We see this with the specialty public schools at the primary and secondary levels already.
> [merit slots] will become competitive without a strict standard required
Yes, and I see this as a good thing. If someone wants free tuition at a top university, they have to be very good, way above average. Free tuition at a good, but not top school would be a lot less competitive, but still require ability and work.
And we should also get away from the current state where everyone feels compelled to spend 4-5 years on higher education after school. That's a fad of the last 30 years and it is not a healthy one for the society. My 2c.
"Yes, and I see this as a good thing. If someone wants free tuition at a top university, they have to be very good, way above average. Free tuition at a good, but not top school would be a lot less competitive, but still require ability and work."
For example in the US today, scholarships are competitive (as any free money is), but the selection criteria has little to do with merit. Even top universities (MIT, Stanford, Harvard) specifically do not provide merit-based financial aid. There are some exceptions with private scholarships, but those are few. The majority of scholarships and grants are federal or federal+school, where the state puts a lot of specific requirements on the students, mostly based on need with some social mobility mixed in.
The result is that students go through a rigmarole that has very little to do with proving merit for the chosen field to the grant-givers who are themselves far removed from teaching or research in that field.
What I am talking about is a clear set of entrance exams given (or agreed to) by the university itself. No intermediaries, pure merit. This is very far from how the scholarships work in the US today.
The main issue with this approach is that it doesn't help people who struggle financially or come from disfavorable backgrounds -- whom federal student loans aimed to help.
Some sets of circumstances don't favor score maximization on such tests, whereas being in a high income family favors prior access to education that help get those scores for instance. Ergo you'd not solve a better access to education that way.
Similarly, means testing for those slots also has negatives incentives. It's a hard issue to solve.
Test scores are one of the primary vehicles for social mobility in modern America. There are other reasons for correlations between affluence and test scores beyond just environmental unfairness.
Federal student loans themselves have always expressed the tension in parent poster's dichotomy.
On the one hand, we could fund college for only those who need the help.
On the other hand, that would be a political shitstorm because people with means wouldn't receive as much (or potentially even any) benefit.
So the system now has lots of loopholes and sliding scales, so that everyone gets some benefit and supports it. Replace states with families, and it's the NASA approach to political support.
Personally, I think the removal of objective testing is dumb. It may be income/background correlated, but it is objective.
You can address the disparities by providing benefit to those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
More critically, you want a system that doesn't allocate money to 'dumb/lazy but also from an advantaged background'.
The biggest problem is the fundamental inability of two higher education camps: "education should be free" and "education should be market priced" to agree on anything.
What does that mean? The two camps disagree fundamentally - so "the problem is they don't agree"? Why should they be expected to agree something? Perhaps they could agree that "Paris is the Capital France" (see Kids In The Hall's Brain Candy).
It would be better to have a mix: free education slots for students who pass (tough-ish) entrance exams and slots that university can add at market price for students who do not meet the bar. If there are more market price applications than slots schools can select any way they want except on price (i.e., all market rate slots should be priced the same). My 2c.