I understand why people want this but the issues associated with this are large enough to not ignore. Theirs the people who will abuse this system and waste everyones time. A lack of higher education places will cause huge waiting lists along with a lack of professors and classrooms. Also, removing a higher cost of higher education will make higher education go down in quality. Lastly it will make the diplomas and/or other things easier to obtain over saturating the job market along with making high paying jobs decrease in wages due to the availability of new workers.
Free tuition isn't an issue for a lot of countries. I don't think any of these deal with these problems you described. Also tuition doesn't mean you get to go to any college you want. I'm pretty sure places like Harvard would step up their game if they had to compete for students who could choose to go to a free college or university.
There is no way countries wouldn't be having to deal with at least some of those issues. Its basic supply and demand. If the cost is extremely low, the demand (people wanting to go to college) for it would be a lot higher. The supply (teacher/universities) can only go so high, which means at some point they are going to have to limit it with something. Whether it be all the schools "stepping up their game" and making it that much more restrictive to get in to them (yay I get free college!.....oh but apparently I'm too dumb to get accepted anywhere...) or implementing a long waitlist (yay I get free college!....but I don't get to start for another 8 years before its my turn to go...). The US limits it by money. May not be the best limiting factor in some minds, but its what they do.
Also Harvard wouldn't be competing for students. Students would be competing (even more) to get into Harvard.
I'm looking to send my children to universities in Europe just because of the quality of education and the tuition problems with American universities. There are several unis that will allow even out-of-country students to attend for free or low-cost. Those European universities are still at the fore-front of technologies and research whereas the American system unis seem to be slipping.
Don't bother looking at Australia...our Uni's charge almost 3 times more for foreign students, and our government has just allowed universities to charge whatever they want for courses...so everything is about to go up. I think a lot of Aussie parents will be thinking the same thing as you!
I don't completely agree with this, and not in the sense of lowering cost. I just don't believe that going to college makes someone intelligent. There are plenty of people in the world, and plenty of people I know that had great schooling, but are still incompetent at what they do, and I wouldn't trust them any farther than I could throw them. The issue isn't so much the cost of education, it is our culture. We have so much knowledge and information available to us literally at our fingertips now, but a lot of people can't even be bothered to look up a word or its spelling before using it. I guarantee you that you have come across many college graduates using the wrong "their, there, and they're," or using "your" instead of "you're" and vice versa. How many times have you come across an advertisement that has something like the word "fresh" in quotation marks? That isn't how quotations work. People are just lazy and don't care, and college won't fix that.
Countries with free college tuition make it really hard to get admitted, with most youth going to vocational schools or trade schools or even apprenticeships rather than universities. They don't have majors like African American Studies or Gender Equity Studies.
Problem is, there are an awful lot of completely stupid fucking people who came out of college. College tuition does not a smart person make, or words to that effect.
Also Harvard wouldn't be competing for students. Students would be competing (even more) to get into Harvard.
...Nice!