> Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?". Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations.

Do you believe that the people who provide public education through High School are enslaved? If yes, how? If not, why do you assume providing free public college education requires enslavement?

> Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations. Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?

No need to wonder. Tuition for bachelor's degrees is free in multiple countries, for instance Germany, Finland, Sweden, Scotland and Norway. What happened there?

I assume the “enslave” question is meant to allude to the fact that, since nothing is actually free, when demand outstrips supply, at some point “making it free” can only mean forcing people to provide it (financially or personally).

If “x should be free” was a solution to anything, why stop at education? Let’s make everything free!

Are people being forced to provide free public education up to High School in the U.S.? Are they being forced to provide free University education in the countries where it is free?

If something being free implies forcing people to provide it, to the point that "enslaving" them is a reasonable analogy, why have anything free whatsoever? Let's have nothing free!

> Tuition for bachelor's degrees is free in multiple countries...

For the longest time, it used to be free for state residents attending State colleges in California.

In Germany it is common to get kicked out of free university on a technicality and you have to sue to get back in. I am told they do this to keep class sizes manageable and to filter out those who are just there because it’s free and they have nothing else to do.

That sounds like a 'Germany' problem, not a 'free university' problem. There are trivial ways to keep class sizes manageable.

One way is for universities to limit the available places in each degree for first year enrolment, and assign these places based on entrance exam results (as in Spain, where tuition isn't free but is very cheap compared to the U.S.). Another way is to have unlimited first year places, but restrict places from second year onwards to a given number n, allowing only the top n students from the first year to progress (as in France, where tuition is not technically free but averages to < 200€ a year).

> Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?

A high school diploma used to mean something because it was a filter. Once graduation rate became the goal, standards were lowered, and just showing up became enough to graduate.

Higher education does some filtering. Either they filter aggressively at admissions and graduate everybody (Ivies), filter with weed-out classes and lesser degrees (respected public universities), both (other public universities), or offer a middling education and are ranked accordingly. So the degree means something.

I agree that degrees can be filters, but I question what "filter" they represent in modern contexts. From my experiences, the modern degree is little more than a gatekeeping credential to demonstrate you either took on substantial student debt (and thus likely to take lower pay or more precarious employment) or come from a wealthy background (stronger social networks for other rich folks/Capital types; a "pedigree", in other words, a la a caste system).

You're 100% right that a modern American High School Diploma does not reflect any degree of basic competency, because standards were constantly refined downward to promote graduation at all costs; I argue college degrees (and many technology certifications) are much the same, providing little more than a demonstration of taking on debt and rote memorization capabilities, rather than being a functional worker.

So if that's the case, and they're not of practical value as credentials anymore, it could be argued there's no harm in opening fundamental/foundational courses in skills to the entire populace, paid for through taxpayer money and restricted to State/Public non-profit Institutions. If we're really concerned about costs, we could implement caps on consumption unless part of a degree program to ensure those taking the advanced courses for employment prospects are given priority over those seeking non-professional growth. There's a lot of wiggle room to be had, if we're serious about opening this up.

I don't understand this sentiment. You have no problem spending $800 billion in tax payer money on military in a country that hasn't fought a defensive war in 200 years but as soon as the same concept is applied to education or healthcare it's somehow wrong?

This is false equivalence. Most of us that share his ideology aren’t fine with either.

Why would we be in the “foreign forever wars should be free” camp?

When approaching these sorts of situations, it is best to steelman your discussion partner’s argument. It will help in your understanding. People who disagree with you aren’t all stupid.

> Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education?

There's a concept called public money which can build roads, dams and other cute concrete things. Why can't you use that for payroll in higher education? Not everybody can learn the same way, not everybody has a separate and chill space in their homes to study without interruption.

Roads serve the needs of now, knowledge builds roads to the future.

> I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free".

Because you're focusing on the accumulation of a finite resource (currency, land, etc) as the sole barometer for success, and then conflating "freedom for use" with "freedom from cost". Obviously salaries have to be paid, buildings maintained, and improvements paid for. Obviously this all costs money, which is a finite resource. Obviously that money has to come from somewhere. Taxation enables everyone to contribute a fraction of the cost regardless of use, and an effective social program (like free education) distributes that cost effectively over time since there's zero chance 100% of the population will consume that resource at the same time, or even in the same year.

It's basic societal maths. If we accept forgoing a profit on the consumption of the resource (healthcare, roads, mail service, education, defense), we can lower the cost substantially and concentrate on its effective utilization. If we do that, we can carve up the cost across the widest possible demographic (taxpayers), and assign a percentage of it as taxation relative to income and wealth. It's how governments work.

> Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?"

Does anyone subscribe to this in the current economy? Everything has record high prices, yet still bombards you with advertisements, sells your data, and requires replacement in a matter of years instead of being repairable indefinitely. University education has boiled down to little more than gargantuan debt loads to acquire a credential for potential employment, a credential that often has no relevancy to the field you actually find work in.

So no, I don't subscribe to that, and I haven't for a decade. My $15,000 used beater car is literally more reliable than a six-figure SUV, and it doesn't keep mugging me for more value to the manufacturer through surveillance technology and forced-advertising.

> Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?

Yes. I imagine much of the populace would be better educated and informed about how modern, complex systems work. More people would be fiercely resistant to the low-wage, high-labor jobs that flood the market, forcing a reconciliation of societal priorities. I figure we'd have more engineers, and artists, and accountants, and tradespersons. We'd have more perspectives to existing problems from a broader swath of the economic strata, instead of the same old nepobabies from a lineage of college graduates making the same short-sighted mistakes.

The question is, have you considered what might happen if we made a four-year degree more economically accessible?

> If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either.

Now you're just insulting people because they lack means, and conflating it with lack of motivation. I've lived with people whose sole education was reading books in Public Libraries because they never had public education, with Section 8 housing recipients hammering online learning courses from shared computers to try and find a way upward and out of poverty. None of that gets them a foot in the door, because they don't have the physical piece of paper that says "University Graduate" and the social networks you build from physically attending school - which adults cannot do without money or taking on substantial debt, that in turn jeopardizes their ability to survive.

If you want a society where only those of monied means have the ability to succeed, well present-day America is certainly an excellent demonstration of that. I'd rather build a society where all of us contribute a part of the proceeds of our labor to build a more equitable society for all, so everyone has an opportunity to found that new business, make those social connections, or try new ideas, without worrying about losing their home or paying for healthcare treatments.

> Does anyone subscribe to this in the current economy?

Not anyone whose net worth is under -say- fifty- or a hundred-million dollars and is older than their mid-thirties, that's for sure.

If you're not rich enough to routinely afford very well-made things, and you're old enough to know that very many things legitimately used to be far, far higher quality for not that much more inflation-adjusted money [0], then you sure as shit don't subscribe to that saying anymore.

[0] And sometimes, far less... especially when you factor in the cost of continually replacing the garbage that's all that you can afford.