Stanford is now free

Well, the thing is that the U.S. is never going to offer free tuition to everyone. It really can't.

Small countries can build a network of public universities that are intertwined with the social welfare network of the nation. Universities are free there for the same reason that there is universal healthcare access and a fully functional mass transit system.

We're really just too huge of a place for that to function in such a way. We also have 200 years of private industry filling in roles reserved for the government in other countries. We have tons of private universities in this country. And, in some areas, we have entirely too many public universities.

The best we could ever hope for would be individual U.S. states trying to offer a benefit like this. So if New York basically turned around and said that all NYS residents can now attend college at a SUNY school for free. A key problem would be how that would be paid for. Another issue would be the likely death of many private universities in the state. I'm sure it wouldn't be long before residents of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont and possibly Ontario began registering mailboxes in the state to try to take advantage of the free tuition. And even if this unlikely scenario ever took place there would still be 49 states, the District of Columbia and a bunch of territories and possessions that wouldn't be offering free college. There would be, at least, a double digit number of states that maintained that free education was somehow "communist" and that real education should either be funded with family cash or mountains of student loan debt.

Barring this major shift, we should celebrate elite schools offering pathways for disadvantaged (or at least, non-advantaged) students to attend. To crap on Stanford because 30% of their student body took advantage of this program ("but that means 70% of the students came from families earning more...") is so ludicrous it really doesn't warrant recognition. Go back a few decades and 98% of students at these schools came from money. Neither Stanford nor Princeton are obligated to provide free tuition to smart kids without money. But they do. And that's good. We don't have the infrastructure to do what is done in Germany. We don't have the political climate to do what they do in Germany. We just can't become Germany. The best we can hope to do is improve our system, such as it is. Schools like Stanford are doing that and we should celebrate such moves.

 

My next book is called Completely Free Colleges - this has been a hobby interest of mine for a while.

 

Sounds neat. Please let us know when it's available for sale.

 

Does anyone know if there are any free (or mostly free) DL offerings from Germany?

 

But . . . shouldn't it be free?:sly:

 

It will be once the workers of the world unite in revolution to redistribute books.

 

A little off topic, but since we are talking about Stanford, a little while ago I was researching Health Savings Accounts and found that Stanford Federal Credit Union has one of the best interest rates in the country for an HSA. 1.51%APR for the Premier HSA account. Much better than the .2% I was making before.

The hard part, was becoming eligible to join since I'm not a student, faculty, staff, or alumnus of the university and live on the opposite end of the country. However, I found joining the "Friends of the Palo Alto Library" for $20 makes me eligible for membership in the credit union.

Now I have a nice ATM card with an image of Stanford University that I use almost everyday. People ask me, "Did you graduate from Stanford?" and I reply, "Nope, never been there."

 

As soon as some overseas jackdonkey makes a copy and distributes the pdf, it will be. That only took about a week with my first one. Thankfully, honest people are still willing to shell out ten bucks for a paperback.