This House Believes that Government Should Pay for University Fees

The social-democratic model, most prevalent in Europe, is a failure. The system of paying for universal healthcare, education, pensions, etc. threatens to bankrupt the countries maintaining them; it is simply unsustainable. The cost of paying for free university education is ruinously high. The government money needed to be channeled into universities to provide for free education, as well as into various other generous social welfare benefits, has been a case of borrowing from future generations to finance current consumption. For these countries to survive, and lest other countries attempt to follow suit with similar models, they must rethink what they can afford to provide freely to citizens. In the case of education, it seems fair to say that all states should offer access to their citizens to primary and secondary education opportunities, since the skills acquired during such education are absolutely necessary for citizens to function effectively within society; reading, writing, basic civics, etc. are essential knowledge which the state is well-served in providing. University, on the other hand, is not essential to life in the same way. People can be functional and responsible citizens without it; it can be nice to attend, but one can live effectively without it. For this reason, the state must consider university in the same way it does any non-essential service; people may pay for it if they wish to partake, but they cannot view it as an entitlement owed by the state that will simply provide it to everyone. The cost is just too high, and the state must act from a utilitarian perspective in this case. Instituting fees will place the cost of education upon those wishing to reap the benefits of education, and not on the taxpayer. When the state offers a universal service, inefficiencies inevitably arise with its provision. There are four principal economic problems that arise from free university education. First, there is a major problem of resources being lost to bureaucracy. In a state-funded university system, tax money is wasted on paying civil servants to deal with procurement questions with regard to funding for universities, as well as in mis-allocation of funds due to bureaucrats" lack of expertise and specialist knowledge necessary to know the correct funding decisions, which independent universities would be able to make on their own more efficiently. Second, when the state funds all university education for free, funding will be allocated to unprofitable courses. As there is no profit motive or price mechanism driving these decisions, there is no way of reaching an efficient decision except by guesswork. The funding of students who are not really interested in attending university or who are apathetic toward higher education creates the third problem. Such students only attend because it is free to do so, and it would be much better to enact a system whereby such students cannot claim a trip to university as an entitlement. A moral hazard problem emerges among such students. They are allowed to reap all the benefits of education, while needing to incur none of the costs. The student who goes to university to waste three or our years and study an easy arts course imposes an unjust cost on society, who has to pay for these students who are not in university to gain from it, but merely to waste time and not work hard. The fourth problem of free university education is saturation of degree-holders in the market . In order to have value, a degree must be a signal of quality. When everyone has a degree, the value of such a qualification plummets. The ability for employers to ascertain high quality potential employees is thus presented with greater difficulty in making a selection. The flip side of this is that graduates end up serving in jobs that do not require a degree-holding individual to do them. Thus, a system of fees is superior to free education because it allows for more efficient allocation of resources to universities and to individuals. Without university fees, universities become dependent on the state for funding. The problem with this is that the state"s aim is to increase university attendance levels for the sake of political gain, while at the same time striving not to increase spending on the universities. The result is an increase in attendance, without commensurate increase in funding from the state. This leads to larger class-sizes and less spending per student. Furthermore, these problems result in disconnected lecturers who, due to increased class sizes, cannot connect to their students or offer more than cursory assistance to struggling pupils. The decline in teaching quality is further exacerbated by their need to focus less on teaching and more on research, which is more profitable and thus encouraged by cash-strapped universities. With fees, on the other hand, the quality of universities increases for three reasons. First, funding improves, as university may charge in accordance with need rather than with making do with whatever the state gives them to fund teaching. The result is a consistent quality in education resources rather than it being dependent upon what the state happens to give universities, and on how many students it pushes to be accepted. Second, quality of teaching is improved. Because a university wants people to attend and to pay fees, the programs and degrees they offer have to be good signals of quality. Universities thus stay in business only so long as they remain purveyors of high quality educational goods. They must thus let in smart people, irrespective of their financial background, which will in part serve to admit and finance capable people from disadvantaged backgrounds through targeted financial aid programs. Third, the average quality of students attending university will improve. This is because students feel they need to get the most from their investment in education, which can be quite substantial. They will thus be more attentive and more interested in doing well. An example of higher quality education stemming from fee-paying higher education systems is that of the United States, which has twenty of the top fifty ranked universities in the world. Quality is clearly improved when university is not free. Not everyone goes to university. Many do not go because they simply do not want to. Others feel they can do something more productive than continuing in education. Yet all taxpayers fund higher education when it is a state-funded enterprise. The state funds essential services, but higher education is not such a service. People do not need it to live. For this reason the state should not allow a subset of society to mooch on the taxpayer for its own benefit. Attendees already tend to make lots more money than non-graduates, and will, if they make good decisions, have the facility to pay back loans if they need them in a fee-paying system. Additionally, the specific subset free university education tends to benefit is not the disadvantaged, the group the state talks about helping when it institutes such policies, but rather the middle and upper classes who would have paid fees, but now can enjoy a free education courtesy of the taxpayer. This pattern has been seen in Ireland, for example, where poorer communities still view higher education as something for the rich even though it is free. These groups continue to enter the workforce in similar numbers as they had before the ending of fees, and they still tend to prefer trade schools to universities if they do seek qualifications beyond the secondary level. Clearly, the implementation of free university education does not open it up on an instrumental level to individuals who would not have attended otherwise due to being from poor areas. [Source: http://www2.idebate.org...]