Education is vital and maybe the source for hope in the

future.
Everyone needs education. At least the fundamental type which is Primary. People should not
have to pay for education. If we didn't have education, we wouldn't be expressing our opinions in
the first place. If we didn't have education, we wouldn't be able to even read what I just said. Not
many people have a successful career in their lives, and if education is not free, they may not
have the sufficient funds to help their children go to school. What this would mean is they may
not get the skills they need for their future to find a job or even hope. Many people in Africa and
other places which does not provide free education as a law, when asked, wished they had
education. Not all countries have a good economy. If everyone had free education, maybe the
world would be a better place...

Education for Free

Education is vital for the survival of one's academic, social, and, if need be, a political career.
Education requires a substantial amount of money, yet, one must not make it exclusive, so that
the entire world may move at the same pace, so that problems like world poverty, or world
hunger, is solved. Otherwise, the world would essentially go nowhere, unable to make its
geniuses work harder. In 50 years, global warming will get worse, and in 20, the world will be so
polluted that one must not step outside the streets without proper portable ventilation! Whereas,
if free education let rise the many potential geniuses in the world, then all of these problems may
be solved. At least, with more minds, you stand a chance against the main obstacles festering the
world today.

YES, EDUCATION SHOULD BE FREE

BY ALBERTO TORRES 8/10/2015

The advocacy of free education, no tuition fees, may appear at first sight as irrational and
ideologically driven – especially in the age of ‘neoliberal consensus’ where market forces are
revered and the prosperity of private capital and financiers is sanctified.

There is no question that advocacy of free education is ideologically driven, as far as believing
access to higher education should not be contingent on parental income, background, ethnicity,
or gender, and as far as believing it is an excellent pathway to reduce inequality in the long term
and foster a more prosperous, cohesive society. However, while principles of justice and equality
should indeed guide policy making, neither these principles nor the popular slogan “education is
a basic right” automatically imply publicly funded tuition fees. This short essay thus intends to
give a defence of free education predicated on economic arguments.

The (im)practicality of loans.

Across advanced capitalist western economies, student loans are becoming increasingly
common. According to data from the Department of Education in the UK, 48 percent of pupils
from state schools go to university as opposed to 90 percent from private schools (7 percent of
the total population). This is the premise on which the argument in favour of tuition fees rests:
further education is regressive on the taxpayer (the poor subsidise the education of the rich), and
there are huge private financial benefits from education, therefore it makes sense for individuals
to bear a significant part of the cost of their education.

While there may be a certain theoretical basis for tuition fees, practically, financial experts
anticipate that 73 percent of UK students will never repay their loans, even including those who
secure work in respectable professions (Garner, 2014). Countries with similar systems like the
US and Australia also report similar problems (Barr, 2013, p. 318). Unlike mortgages, student
loans have no physical collateral, where the bank can expropriate the house or where assets can
be sold to pay for debt. There is also an adverse selection problem. It is impossible to know
whether the student borrower will be able to get and keep a job that will pay for a loan after
university. With low growth and increasing job insecurity, the prospects for students to repay
debts are stark. This raises the question of whether tuition fees even help ‘to balance the budget’
of governments committed to austerity.

Tuition as a problem in itself.

Even operating under the assumptions that the loan system works and that tuition fees have no
impact on social mobility, improvements in information to the least advantaged do not address
the complexity of the issue. Firstly, there are obvious sizeable opportunity costs of spending
three years or more in education for people from low income backgrounds, as these are years of
foregone income earning. With student grants recently withdrawn and the moves towards lifting
the tuition fees cap in the UK, information obstacles can be but a smaller nuisance for poor
families’ accessing education (Streeting, 2015; Shaw, 2015).

Secondly, research has found that the poor tend to be more debt averse, meaning they are less
likely to buy into the loan regime. Debt is also found to be detrimental to mental health and the
well being of students, particularly those of low income backgrounds (Abdallah, 2010). Since
this world is still painfully dealing with the effects of the 2008 economic crisis, with most crises
circumnavigating around bubbles of unsustainable debt, debt aversion is certainly not something
we should be seeking to correct.

Finally, it is believed by psychologists that activities that are seen as intrinsic (doing something
because it fulfils you as an individual) leads to better outcomes than activities that are extrinsic
(in order to obtain financial remuneration or gain status)(Abdallah, 2010). The commodification
of education through tuition is a threat not only to people’s intrinsic motivations, as they put jobs
in finance and ‘well paid’ jobs above their real interests and passions, but to the purpose of
education as a whole. Martin Luther King rightly argued that more than serving an instrumental
purpose, education should be the medium through which we grow morally and where we clarify
our central convictions as human beings (Luther King Jr., 1947).

Free education is of course not a panacea for equality of opportunity and a fairer society, and in
isolation is still highly regressive. It has to be part of a holistic drive to address inequalities
across the social system and early stages of the education system (Lawlor et al., 2011, p.6).
Rather than shaping the education system to increasingly look like a market, it should be shaped
to become more accessible, democratic, and fulfilling for people from all incomes, races and
backgrounds. A free, meaningful education is within our reach, we only have to be prepared to
fight for it.

NO, EDUCATION SHOULD NOT BE FREE

BY NATHAN HUNTER 8/10/2015

I believe that higher education is a right. I believe that it produces positive externalities for
society as a whole and that the ideal higher education funding system is one of equality of
opportunity. This is why I believe higher education should not be free.

This article focuses on addressing 3 common misconceptions about what the rationale for free
higher education is and what it implies: 1) the idea that higher education can be free; 2) the
notion that tuition fees prevent low-income students from accessing tertiary education; 3) the
thought that, under the current HE funding system, graduates will crumble under unmanageable
amounts of debt.

Addressing common myths about free HE

HE can be free

What does free higher education mean? Is it a system in which we ask academics and
professional staff to work for free? Of course not. Free higher education refers to the taxpayer
taking the full burden of the costs of higher education. In such a funding scheme, whether one
attends university or not, one subsidises higher education through taxes. The question we need to
ask ourselves is who should be paying for higher education?

The benefits of HE are twofold: there is a substantial private benefit for the student attending
HE, and a social benefit, which economists call ‘positive externality’, from having an highly
educated population. The net present value of the private benefit – that is the ‘discounted’ long-
term economic advantage of having a degree instead of a secondary education, minus the
associated costs – is estimated in the UK to be at £168,000 for men and £252,000 for women
(Walker and Zhu, 2013). Society at large benefits from positive externalities through extra tax
revenue (£89,000 extra per individual who gets a university degree) (BIS, 2013).

This should lead debates on HE funding to focus on the fairness and efficiency of different cost-
sharing schemes between the state and the student.
Free HE would help students from low-income backgrounds

In 2010, the Sutton Trust (2010) reported that 16 percent of pupils who claim free school meals
entered higher education compared to 96 percent of independent school pupils. Jake Anders
(2012) found that children born in the top income quintile group are three times more likely to
attend university than those born in the bottom quintile. In other words, the better off your family
the greater the likelihood that you will attend university. This means that, in a system in which
higher education would be fully tax-funded, 84 percent of the families with children who claim
free school meals will essentially be subsidising the cost of the higher education of those
children from wealthier families. Economists call such a system ‘regressive’ and in fact, it has
been documented that before the introduction of fees in the UK in 1998, the HE system was
indeed regressive and did little to help those who were at the bottom of society (Mishkin and
Straub, 2014).

A related point on this matter is that there is no evidence that the level of tuition fees leads to
lower access to HE. In the past ten years the entry rate for the most disadvantaged students has
increased by 72%, and the university entry ratio between the most advantaged relative to most
disadvantaged students declined from 4.37 to 2.77 (Carr, 2014). Interestingly, Filipa Sá has
found in her recent research that despite the tripling of fees in the UK, students from ethnic
minorities “were actually less affected by the increase,” and that “there is no evidence that
attendance has decreased more among students from local authorities with lower rates of
participation in higher education” (Sá, 2015).

The burden of debt is too great for students to shoulder and is responsible for lower
application rates

As we saw previously, the net private benefit to students is greatly larger than the amount of debt
they incur. However, these are average figures, meaning that some students will end up getting a
better return while others will not. Ingeniously, under the current HE funding system, those
students who will not reap much monetary advantage from HE will not find themselves in
trouble because they cannot pay back their debt.

Picture a typical student in a 3-year undergraduate program costing £9,000 per year. Once she
has graduated, her debt-load will be around £35,000 – £40,000 (Boursnell, 2015). At first sight
you might think the student has an unmanageable burden. However our student only repays, each
year, 9% of what she earns above £21,000, which means that if she earns less than the £21,000
threshold she does not repay anything that year, The median graduate is expected by the IFS to
repay, in net present terms, £26,731 (Chowdry et al.,2012, Table 4). This number is surely not
insignificant, but it should be compared to the benefits the student gets from having a degree.
Once we do so, it does not appear unreasonable.
For instance in 2012, a system was reintroduced called Intissab Mowagah—whereby students
who do not get the required grades can join faculties of their choice. They pay relatively high
annual fees and can attend exams but not classes.

On the other hand, students who qualify for “free” education have been slowly complaining
about the quality that they get and the fees they have to pay. A report by the National Council for
Education, Scientific Research and Technology in 2009 indicated what many people knew:
Namely, that while theoretically free, higher education in Egypt cannot be practically described
as free, given prices of books, study booklets and private tutoring.

But many of those who write extensively on how education is no longer really free and how the
system needs changing still support free university education.

Why is support for free higher education so widespread? Well, the answers are usually that it
gives everyone access to university education and many people believe it’s a mark of progressive
societies and allows social mobility. Very few people in Egypt argue against it.

But the critics of the free higher education system cite three main problems:

1. Choice: The current system doesn’t allow students to enter the faculty and university of their
choice. Instead that is decided for them by the country-wide enrollment office based on their
grades and area of residence. The required grades to enter specific faculties keep inching up,
shutting out more and more young people. Scoring 97 percent on the Thanaweya Amma (the last
two years of the Egyptian high school system) might not get a student into a faculty of medicine
for example. If it does, it’s likely to be in a public university in a poor province. Half a percent
difference in grades could make or break a student’s career, with little recourse.

2. Quality: Given Egypt’s population, high enrollment rates and the lack of educational
oversight, educational quality has been going down the drain. To cite a recent example, an
international computer manufacturer required 1,000 assembly line and technician workers for a
new factory in Egypt. Even though more than 100,000 people applied, only six qualified. The
employer noted that 60,000 of the applicants were mechanical-engineering graduates.

3. Unemployment: The Egyptian marketplace has been unable to absorb the high number of
university graduates. Given how unprepared for the modern workplace most graduates are, many
companies opt to hire graduates of expensive, private universities. The inevitable conclusion is
that there are millions of diploma-carrying Egyptians with no job prospects.

A full discussion of education cannot be complete without discussing elementary and secondary
education that dictate how prepared students are for college. The entire educational system in
Egypt is flawed, starting from the secondary education, where all the emphasis is placed on year-
end exams. This system then produces students who learn to memorize instead of think. Once
students are on the job market, the rules of the game change: There is virtually no need for
employees who can only memorize information. Only a small percentage of those memorizers
manage to develop their critical-thinking skills.
The current proposals to privatize higher education, for those reasons, may seem logical on
paper, but they don’t offer much of a solution. While universities might end up being better
financed and more functional, such a strategy does not guarantee improvement in the quality of
the educators, nor how prepared the students will be for the international job market. This is
especially important since big multinationals like Google are going on the record stating that
grades are a worthless hiring criteria.

So, what is the answer for this problem? One possible answer is Massive Open Online Courses,
also knows as MOOCs. In the MOOC world, there are three strong players with thousands of
course offerings and millions of students, all for free and available to anyone in the world. All
that any student needs—theoretically anyways—is a computer and an Internet connection and
they are set to go. This would be familiar territory for the Egyptian youth, who are used to
looking for the truth on the Internet.

So here is a proposal: With the exception of studies that require physical participation and
presence (medicine, pharmacy and engineering, to cite a few examples), why not replicate the
MOOC model in Egypt? Yes, the Internet penetration rate in Egypt is only around 40 percent at
the moment, but why not pay for students’ laptops and give them inexpensive Internet? Although
such a program would still cost the state, it would relieve the larger burden of funding massive
universities and teachers’ salaries and change the university degree paradigm into one based
upon courses and certificates. Students will be able to design their own curricula and shape their
own careers.

MOOCs certainly have their problems. One study found only 4 percent of students who register
for MOOCs finish them. But studies have also found that large proportions of students do engage
with a lot of the course content.

The Internet infrastructure required to expand MOOCS in Egypt would be expensive, but it
would be a worthwhile investment, since it wouldn’t only benefit the students, but private
industry as well. It would also prepare the Egyptian students for a world that is moving slowly
but surely towards virtual employment. It’s a radical solution, but it’s better than all the other
ones being offered in Egypt today and just might be the answer that this convoluted problem
needs.