Free education doesn't mean free living. Lost potential earnings and living are costs that the student has to bare.
Great ideas come from people with multidisciplinary degrees. Today many corporate executives hold JDs and MBAs. The complementary is a value add to the business and, I would say, to society as a whole.
I encourage you to check just about every other country in the world. They all provide free education and nothing you suggest happens.
USnews.com:
Among the international enrollment findings of the annual Open Doors Report: The total number of international students at U.S. universities dropped by 15% from 1,075,496 in 2019-2020 to
914,095 in 2020-2021. The number of new international students enrolling in U.S. universities dropped by 45.6% in that time frame.15 Nov 2021.
Actually, my viewpoint matches the facts that multi generation Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that education is elitist and degrees are a waste of money and are less likely to get a college degrees than recent immigrants who value education above all else.
From census.org
- The percentage of people age 25 and over who had completed less than a high school diploma or equivalent was higher for men (10.6 percent) than for women (9.8 percent).
- Between 2000 and 2018, the percentage of people 25 years and older who had completed a bachelor's degree or higher increased by 9 percentage points, from 25.6 percent to 35.0 percent.
- Among Asians ages 25 to 29 in 2018, almost 7 in 10 (69.5 percent) had a bachelor’s or higher degree. Five years earlier (in 2013), the bachelor’s degree attainment rate for this group was 59 percent.
- Recent immigrants to the United States were more likely to have a college education than earlier immigrants or the native born.
Among immigrants who have arrived since 2000, 38.8 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 35.2 percent of the native-born. Among earlier immigrants, the rate of college education was lower — for those who arrived in the 1990s, it was 31.3 percent.
- Naturalized citizens were among the groups with high levels of college attainment — 38.4 percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The children of immigrants were also likely to have a bachelor’s degree (39.6 percent).
The rising cost of tuition in the US is an outrage. In the Bay Area, private high school tuition is around $50k/year, prep college applications run around $20k and private college tuition in the US cost in excess of $80k per year. Add it all up and you better be super wealthy or your kid ultra bright to get full scholarships. It's just not right.
