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<p>The ‘so what’ is that those people still had to pay for college - both in terms of tuition but also in terms of opportunity costs. Hence, they’re arguably worse off than if they had never gone to college at all and hence never incurred those extra costs. </p>
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<p>The major difference is that all of those options save starting your own business (usually) do not incur costs. Rather, you are paid to train in the military, even if you wash out. You (usually) are paid on a professional apprenticeship. You are paid at least minimum wage to take a low-end McJob right out of high school. </p>
<p>But in college - barring those rare few on full rides, who generally speaking tend to be motivated enough to graduate - you are not paid. Rather, you have to pay. </p>
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<p>But again, like I said, you don’t really get to move on to something else if you find out that you don’t like it. Student debt does not disappear just because you find out that you’re not suited for college. I can think of numerous people who dropped out of college, but are nevertheless encumbered with thousands of dollars of debt that they are forced to work off. They are surely worse off than if they had never gone to college at all. {Heck, I know plenty of other people who did graduate from college but are also encumbered with thousands of dollars in debt while having earned unmarketable degrees and hence are arguably worse off than if they had never gone at all.} </p>
<p>I might agree with a system where you don’t incur student debt until and unless you actually graduate. But that’s not the system we have today. You have to pay whether you graduate or not. </p>
<p>I would draw the analogy to sensible financial regulation of consumer products: something that the country surely rues lacking during the last decade as the continuing financial tribulations continue to poison our economy. If you offer people a particular product with a dubious promise of a financial payoff - whether that be a college education or a balloon payment ‘NINJA’ mortgage - some people who are unsuited for those products will nonetheless take them anyway, risking great harm to not only themselves but also to the rest of the economy. Again, people with student debts are unable to look for the most suitable job that they can find. They have to take whatever they can find because they have to service their debt now. They can’t even (easily) expunge that debt through bankruptcy proceedings, because of the legal protections available to student debt creditors. </p>
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<p>Your premise is absolutely false - academia is the antithesis of a free market because it does not conform to market forces. After all, if academia was truly a free market, then schools such as Harvard should be free to sell each and every one of their admissions seats to the highest bidder, regardless of their academic credentials, in the same way that private enterprises sell at whatever price the market will bear. {Granted, schools surely do sell some of their seats, but only if you are willing to pay multi-millions.} A dirt-poor but highly talented person not only has a chance to go to Harvard, but will even be granted a full ride through financial aid. Will General Motors not only hand out free Cadillacs to poor people, but also pay them to drive (as long as those poor people are superstar drivers)? </p>
<p>Rather, what you seem to be saying is that people should be free to make choices according to the non-free market diktats of academia. But then if that is the case, then you have no inherent objection to organizations changing their incentives to foster different types of behavior. For example, what if university Literature departments stopped funding scholars to endlessly debate various literary works and instead started funding scholars to actually create new works? In either case, people are simply doing what organizations incentivize them to do, so what is the problem? </p>
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<p>Then let’s take the example of academic literary analysis. Exactly what clear value-add has that ever provided to society? I struggle to think of a single instance, nor do I think the prospects of one to be bright for the future. </p>
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<p>Again, the ‘so what’, is that many people are actually hurt by the college experience because they actually have to pay to attend, as opposed to joining the military or just plain old employment, where they get paid. Even the debt incurred by starting a failed business venture can potentially be extinguished through a bankruptcy proceeding. But not student debt. Student debt is a burden that you have to carry until paid off.</p>
<p>Let’s also remember that we don’t live in the utopia of academic free choice that you claim to support. For example, you asked me: “Are you going to tell them they can’t go to college?..Doesn’t that strike you as a little young for this new “equilibrium” of yours to be dooming many of them to life in the uneducated work force and reserving college for only the chosen few who meet your standards of self-knowledge and motivation?”</p>
<p>But restriction of choice happens now. Barring the open-admissions community colleges (few of which offer bachelor’s degrees), the vast majority of colleges run some sort of admissions process. What that means is that, right now, there are plenty of Americans who are not permitted a chance to earn a bachelor’s degree because they can’t get admitted. Even those who are admitted may not necessarily be admitted to a college that they like for geographic or cultural reasons, or to one that offers an academic program that interests them. I can’t just wake up one fine day and decide that I want to study Electrical Engineering at MIT. I have to be admitted to MIT first, and I probably won’t be. </p>
<p>So unless you’re advocating the extreme position that every single college should offer open admissions to everybody, then we have to live with the current system where choices are restricted, as just because you want to earn a bachelor’s degree doesn’t mean that some 4-year school is automatically going to admit you. And since choices are already restricted anyway, what’s so outrageous about restricting them in a different way? Either way, we’re going to have restricted choices.</p>