No such thing as a free education

Some fools at UCL, led by the usual left-wing brigade, have embarked on a campaign for “Free Education”.  My position on fees has been documented before: let universities charge what they’re worth.  Now, being an economist, I looked at that and was bemused.  Knowing only that, in a competitive market, price = marginal cost, that means that, given a price of zero, the amount of money the universities would spend on the education will be… zero.  Students campaigning for worthless education, eh?  Novel.

When I aired this opinion, I was told that progressive taxation levied on graduates would be the way forward.  OK, that’s exactly what I debunked before.  That means that students that work hard and get something out of their degree (i.e. the professionals and entrepreneurs hit by the progressive tax rise) will be punished.  Those that won’t get punished would be the people that go to university and do nothing with their degrees: drop-outs and lay-abouts.

So let’s look at the two countries in the developed world with the highest drop-out rates, Italy and France: where a whopping 66% and 45% of students don’t finish their degrees respectively.  What also marks these countries out?  That’s right, they have the lowest levels of OECD-recognised graduates in their population amongst the G7 (12% and 16% respectively), the highest taxes (54% and 49% of GDP), and not a single university in the top 25 in the world betwen them (the UK alone has six; the USA has fourteen).  Oh, yes, and both have open education: you apply, you pay a nominal fee, and you’re in.

The Facebook group has a seriously long-winded introduction that debunks and refutes none of these points.  It makes no attempt to answer criticisms of free education or argue for it except in the blandest of left-wing ideological tones:

Now is the time to ask questions about university and how we fund it. What is education? Can you put a price on learning? And is education really the right place for the market? Education is and must remain a basic and fundamental right which should allow the “full development of the human personality”, as enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Education should be free and accessible to all students including international students.*

Those that can’t put a price on education don’t know its value, because they don’t get anything out of it.  The rest of us go to university with the primary purpose of making sure we realise the value of education.  The people behind these campaigns are ideologically-driven nut-jobs that don’t care about students’ welfare or education level: only about the content of the UN Declaration on Human Rights.  More than anyone, they’ve shown us just the sort of people that aren’t capable of benefiting from a university education!

* Does it need to be shown that international students have to pay fees? They’re frigging international: they’d come here for our “free” education, and certainly NOT stay for our exhorbitant progressive taxes!