Publicly tax paid post-secondary/college education in the U.S.

My case A college degree is only so valuable as the market decides it to be, and that is determined by the scarcity of the degree in the market. In applying for a job, the employer sees my resume, and sees that I went to college. This is valuable because it shows that I have taken the initiative to further my knowledge past the standard of education, which is currently high school, to go to college. However, what my opponent is advocating for is changing the standard of education to college education, instead of high school. When a college education is free to the student, future employers will expect their applicants to have a college education, rather than just a high school education, because really, what is the student’s excuse at this point? This has a few impacts. One impact is that it drastically increases the amount of people going to college, thus increasing the costs for all taxpayers as tuition and student numbers go up, another is that it devalues the degree, thus making graduate school necessary for future high-earning employability, and finally, that it is making people who really shouldn't have to pay for someone's college education pay for it. College admittance overload When college is "free" to attend for the student, this means quite clearly that we are going to get a huge increase in the amount of people attending college. We’re going to get teens, college dropouts, people who never attended, etc. all flooding the system, because now it is no longer a monetary investment for them to have the education that is publicly perceived as essential to being successful in life. One might say, “Who cares? Now we have a more educated society.” Well, the taxpayer, and hopefully the students, cares. It is predicted that, by 2018, 60% of job openings will require a college education (1). And that’s just based on the status quo of how accessible a college education is. If one were to take into account the massive inflow of students that would come from taxpayer provided college education, we could expect that number to go significantly higher as college becomes the new standard of education, thus making a college degree approach pointlessness. Skyrocketing prices, decreased quality, or both? Now, my opponent would like you, the judge, to believe that government could somehow magically control cost without decreasing the quality of the education. But as I have shown above, the colleges are going to have significantly more students than they are going to be accustomed to, and the only way they would be able to adequately provide for them is if they were to increase costs. That being said, my opponent wants to plan controls into college spending levels. But if the college can’t raise prices to be paid by the taxpayers, then the college won’t be able to provide a high quality education to all of its students. But if my opponent revokes the cost control portion of his plan, then we are going to have skyrocketing prices to be paid by taxpayers that will be there for a skyrocketing amount of students. Essentially, with taxpayer-funded college, you’re going to have an ever-increasing tax burden to be paid for by everyone as more people go to college. If price controls don’t exist, then that price is going to be increased many-fold and will be increasing at a rate faster than ever before. If price controls do exist, then the taxpayers will be paying for an education that will be sub-par. What my opponent is proposing is a lose-lose system. Why should a person be forced to pay for someone else’s kid to go to college? At the core of my opponent’s plan, taxpayers would pay for college. However, it would seem ridiculous to force a parent to pay for another parent’s child to go to college, or to force someone who doesn’t even have kids to pay for that cost. This is also fundamentally unfair to parents who have already paid for their kid's college, and who now need to pay again, for, as I've shown, little to no clear benefit. So why should a person be forced to pay for someone else’s kid? This is not a rhetorical question; I expect an answer from my opponent. If he can’t adequately answer it, then he loses the debate. If he can, then he still needs to refute all of my other points, or I win. And now to take these points together What my opponent is proposing is a system where the taxpayer provides for college education to increase accessibility. However, what we see is that this would increase accessibility to the point where the college degree would be hugely devalued in the job market, thus making it so students would need to go to graduate school to get the high earning job formerly promised by a college degree (which repeats the problem of accessibility and price that my opponent is trying to solve for in the first place), which would make it take even longer for people to become productive members of our economy and would come at a huge cost to the taxpayer, which is everyone. Controls on how much colleges spend would inevitably decrease the quality of the post-secondary education (while still increasing price to taxpayers as people flood the system) and to not control the spending would mean an even higher rate of tax increases to the people of our country. And this would all be paid for by people who really shouldn’t have to be paying for it. So now to refute my opponent’s points. High costs can be negated by heightening corporate taxes These heightened corporate taxes would just be indirectly taxing the people. This is because, when a corporation expects to earn X dollars per year, and their taxes are increased, they just raise the prices of their goods and services so they still earn X dollars per year. The same people who are paying taxes are paying these costs, so heightening corporate taxes creates zero solvency. “As the wages of those who take advantage of this goes up, society as a whole also will make more money- Leading to everyone eventually benefiting.” This is making a pretty big assumption that wages would go up. Everybody has more of their income taken away trying to pay for college through taxes, and additionally, the college degree would be devalued, as I have shown above. The value of a college degree is relative to how scarce it is in the market, and when most people have college degrees, that value goes away. “Over about a ten year period, the cost to invest will go down and the country will still continue to show improvements in wages and lower poverty rates.” This is a huge claim, and my opponent has not provided any evidence to support this, logical or empirical. Until he has provided evidence, I ask that the judges not take this bare assertion into account. But even so, we have no reason to buy that point based on the fact that the college education would be devalued in the market. Conclusion So to conclude this round, the judges have no reason to vote for Pro. The positive impacts of his case are based on the assumption that a college education would increase the value of the students in the job market, which is simply false given the fact that the value of the degree would go away. So this means that he would be pointlessly and drastically increasing taxes for no clear or evidence supported benefit. In my case, I have shown that publicly provided college/post-secondary education would exacerbate the problems we have with education drastically, by increasing costs, decreasing quality, decreasing the education’s value, and forcing the payment on people who shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s kid. Thank you for reading, I urge a vote for my side. Sources: 1. http://www.reviewjournal.com...