Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

Because public uni income now is obscene (IMHO) and under our broken two party system, funding would likely be much less as the parties squabble over funding and making compromises.

It would also be interesting to see how the government deals with the often-immense income from college athletics programs (football, basketball, etc).

Argument I read from an economist was that economists want to you pretend that negative externalizes don't matter. And that positive ones don't exist. He said if you accept positive ones exist then that changes a lot. What economists hate is the idea that a society where people chose actions with positive externalities is better off than one where they are selfish.

Someone going to night school to get a learn something and get a degree has large positive externalities .

So think of the the reverse of a pigovian tax where you tax people doing things with negative externalizes. Here you subsidize people doing things you do want and tax everyone else who might benefit to pay for it.

A bit off topic, but honestly meeting people at top schools and mid/low ranked schools, I don't see much of a difference except in the opportunities these people have. Whether it is physics or CS, I don't see a meaningful quality difference in their work, only that the Stanford/MIT/Berkeley kid gets more internships and has an easier opportunity getting a new job if they mess up at their old one. I routinely see people from very prestigious universities with PhDs fail on rather simple concepts that are within their domain (or answered by a google search). E.g. I've had someone from a top 5 CS school, with a PhD in ML, ask on my github to solve a tensor mismatch for them when my research code uses pytorch's nn.Embeddings and we direct them to the correct checkpoint to use (but they don't). (not our code so we don't directly provide the embedding checkpoint, but we indirectly do)

A bit on topic, if this trend is as strong as it appears to be (many people I talk to see the same thing) then it really shows an over valuing of elite schools and frames this entire argument a bit differently. It would make sense that this should happen too, as teaching positions are highly competitive so there's a strong trickle down effect. You routinely see at low ranked schools professors from high ranked schools (often in a soft retire, for location, or in a junior position). It would make sense that quality levelizes when a single top ranked school produces more PhDs than there are positions to fill nation wide. And on top of the general _trend_ that you can only work at a university lower in ranking than the one you attended (immediately post graduation).

Elite schools transmute money into merit. Even if we completely marketize them, the human biases that exist in relation to them are sticky.

This doesn't mean that "people's biases are wrong, therefore the consequences are irrelevant." It means that the choices made must account for those biases. The choices we make regarding merit laundering, must account for people's biases toward graduates. We would be fools not to.

Only if you satisfy a long list of conditions. The reason this is the case is that Switzerland sorts kids very early, at 12 years essentially. Get sorted wrongly once and while you do get a second chance, they make sure it takes you 2 years absolute minimum, 4-6 years normally and even more is possible to enter university. Oh, and if you get sorted wrong (lang or kurzgymnasium), it takes years and expensive courses to get back.

The low tuition only applies if you enter before you turn 25 years old. And Zurich is very expensive to rent a room.

Even once in university, you only get one chance (you should see the crying on results day), if you want to redo a year, you can do it in Germany (closest) or France/Italy that do allow it. Which of course is anything but cheap, as a non-local you do not qualify for any kind of aid.

But sure, what you say is correct, tuition is not that high and if you really try, yes you can get through it as a very poor person. But one mistake and it'll take you a very long time to claw back, and a lot of money.

(this is about ETH Zurich, EPFL is similar, but not quite as bad)