Free Education: Pros, Cons, and Controversy - Essay Sample

Introduction

The concept of free education in an economy has become a controversial issue over the past decades. The provision of free education has its advantages and disadvantages. When equal education opportunities are awarded in an economy, even the disadvantaged can perform exceptionally. On the other hand, such provisions would be costly to an economy. There are several reasons why the issue is controversial. The essential factor is that all students deserve the ability to get an affordable, quality education from the earliest stages of K-12 schooling to high-level degrees. College is vital to boosting the economy and creating full participants in the United States democracy. This is why it should be paid for and by public dollars and should be treated as a right to all members of the United States. Therefore, the education should be free for everyone because it would reduce the poverty rate in a country, there would be more educated citizens that possibly will lower the crime rate, and finally will bring the higher community welfare in one country.

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There are several reasons why education should be free in the United States. To start with, a free college education can be highly beneficial to a nation in terms of economic growth and development. Today, the United States has a significant comparative advantage to many other countries globally in terms of technological development and production of products and services (Samuels, 2013). However, the relative position has been diminishing gradually as developed and developing nations continue building up economically and technologically. A major with "free education" is that there is no way that it could be completely free. The money needed to provide affordable or tuition-free education would be subsidized by a substantial increase in taxes and specific monetary reallocations within the government system. To realize this, there would have to be political and cultural changes. For the United States, it could be said that to achieve free education, and there should be a change in the overall perspective of the social meaning of education. Countries such as Finland embrace students of all backgrounds and income levels and focus on educational equity. Hannele Niemi, a professor of education at the University of Helsinki details how changes such as these have helped raise Finland in the worldwide education ranking (2016).

The provision of a free college education is equal to the acknowledgment of the fundamental right of all individuals to education. As Noddings (2018) explains, all individuals have a right to acquire knowledge at any school level. College provides an ample opportunity for individuals to exercise that right. This can help students and the surrounding community in a plethora of ways. With free, or at least more affordable college, improvements can be made in social mobility and movement in social justice would occur. Associate professors and faculty of education at Simon Fraser University, Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo detail the theoretical concepts of socialization, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, and power, and privilege as critical aspects in how social justice in education is affected (2017). This means that free education provides a chance that may not be available at any other time in life. It is a time of intellectual, personal and spiritual exploration. Such opportunities may not exist in secondary and professional life. College serves as a valuable forum that allows students to exchange views, ideas, and experiences.

An affordable, quality education can also change the modern perspective on high-level degrees. Many students view current higher education as something that results in an unbeatable and no dischargeable debt for life, preventing them from having a home, family, and a financially sound future. This should not be the case. Education is meant to help further one's quality of life and not decrease it. Furthermore, college experience shapes the perceptions of individuals towards society. In turn, the opinions give form to the relationships between state and citizens. The country has a responsibility to facilitate personal and social development. Promoting individual and social development by providing access to higher education increases the likelihood that citizens will give support to democracy presently and in the future. As Bowen (2018) argues, individuals cannot be productive citizens without having a proper education. As such, a college education is essential in the contemporary world to facilitate the development of informed citizens.

According to Williams (2016), the Marxist argument for an equally distributed resource does not leave anybody behind in building a stable society. Higher education used to be heavily subsidized for kids who were the smartest of their classes. This was because the return on investing in those people was beneficial. After the "No Child Left Behind" gifted program was created and classes started catering to the lowest grades in the class instead of the highest, students were made to "pass" basic standardized tests whether or not they understood the content. Many opponents against free education believe that if education were free for everybody, money would ultimately be wasted on people who are achieving low grades. A counterargument to this is the issue that many colleges choose the "best" and "worst" pupils based on grades achieved by young adolescent students in high school. The age-old discussion on whether or not grades determine intelligence can also be called into this argument. Lower test scores can be attributed to laziness, which is not an unusual teenage activity. Many students with high intelligence scores have low grades due to procrastination on projects and laziness with homework. If the goal of education is to get the very brightest and best to get degrees, the only way to do this is to allow every student, no matter their grades, to attempt to do so. This ensures that no scholarly "gem" slips through the hands of the education system. There is no argument as to whether hard-working students who do put in effort should get their school paid for and have access to better scholarships, but more of a case for the students that cannot pay out of pocket. These students should have the ability to prove themselves later in life when they are ready to. According to Sharp (2017), priority one should be reducing tuition to a reasonable rate so that no one is opposed or unable to go to college because of the prices.

Conclusion

In Summary, there are numerous compelling reasons why college education should be made free in the US. As explained in the above discussion, free knowledge can be beneficial to a state in terms of economic, cultural and leadership development. However, the US government must ensure that measures are put in place to ensure that the intended benefits are realized. To ensure that the economic benefits of free education are achieved, structures should be set aside to ensure that resources allocated for the program are not misused or misallocated. Measures should also be taken to ensure that quality is not compromised. To achieve social benefits, the US government should ensure that a positive culture is fostered after the implementation of the free college education program. A unique positive culture can even translate into other benefits such as economic growth. Barriers to access to education such as gender inequality should be eliminated to ensure that the benefit of leadership development is achieved. As explained in the essay, offering free college education amounts to an acknowledgment of individuals' fundamental rights for education.

Works Cited

Bowen, Howard. Investment in learning: The individual and social value of American higher education. Routledge, 2018.

Increase Quality at American Universities. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2013

Niemi, Hannele. "The societal factors contributing to education and schooling in Finland: The Finnish education: Equity and quality as its main objectives." The miracle of education. Brill Sense, 2016. 23-40.

Noddings, Nel. Philosophy of education. Routledge, 2018.

Samuels, Robert. Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free: How to Decrease Cost and

Sensory, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is everyone equal?: An introduction to key concepts in social justice education. Teachers College Press, 2017.

Sharp, Rachel. Knowledge, ideology and the politics of schooling: Towards a Marxist analysis of education. Routledge, 2017.

Williams, Timothy. "Oriented towards action: The political economy of primary education in Rwanda." Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) Working Paper 64 (2016).