Education

  • Mandate comprehensive education in civics and the law, including the history of law-making – not just the US Constitution, but Hammurabi, Greece, Roman, British, American, French, Soviet, etc. How did the idea of human rights and freedoms evolve? What was the nature of the struggle for change? How was it codified? How has it changed?
  • Institute free 4-year public college education for all citizens
  • Institute free trade school training sufficient for full licensing for all citizens who choose not to go to a traditional 4-year college.
  • Forgive all current college debt accrued toward a 4-year degree (BA, BS, etc.).
  • Heavily subsidized post-baccalaureate degrees for professions that are strategic or impacted, such as medicine, nursing, engineering, education, and elderly care. 
  • Institute full tax-deductibility of continuing education for classes from all approved schools (community and junior colleges, public and private universities, graduate degrees)
  • Increase pay of public school teachers, while also establishing clear and reasonable standards of accountability for performance and behavior

Discussion

Some of the data for the following discussion comes from the Council on Foreign Relations. 

The purpose of universal, mandatory public schooling

The purpose of public education should be to:

  • ensure a strong democracy; that voters are well-informed regarding history, our government, and the likely and potential consequences of their votes
  • promote and refresh equal economic and social opportunity
  • promote technological progress
  • improve the quality of life of the citizenry
  • increase overall and individual worker productivity
  • ensure we have the technology and culture to defend ourselves both physically and economically from hostile forces

Universal, public K-12 education was instituted in Massachusets in the mid-1800s. The original purpose was to build good citizens, and this is still an important goal. The 19th century was a time when an 8th grade education was sufficient to get a job that could support a family, but this has not been true for a long time. Today, a person with a 4-year college degree earns 1.8 times as much as a person with a high school education, and a person with a graduate degree earns twice as much. So educational opportunity = economic opportunity. 

Traditional college education is not for everyone, nor is it the only viable path to economic self-sufficiency, especially if the US re-establishes itself as a manufacturing nation. There are good jobs in trades such as construction, plumbing, electrical work, and many others that do not require a college education, but rather an effective trade education. Germany has a good system to emulate in this regard.

The burden of educational debt

College debt is a major burden on the economy, and a common contributor to bankruptcy. Student debt has more than doubled over the last two decades. As of September 2022, about forty-eight million U.S. borrowers collectively owed more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loans. Additional private loans bring that total to above $1.7 trillion, surpassing auto loans and credit card debt. Only home loan debt is still larger. And a greater proportion of this debt burden falls on non-white, particularly black, students.

This is not only a burden on the prosperity of students, putting them in a state of debt servitude to banks, but it is also a burden on society.

Social inequity and educational opportunity

As we have seen, educational opportunity is directly correlated with economic opportunity. But the reverse is also true, leading to a self-reinforcing force of social disparity. 

Higher education opportunity is directly related to economic class – children of parents in higher income and wealth deciles have better access to a college education, as shown below. This is directly in opposition to the principle of education as a means to equalize economic opportunity.

As you can see, educational and economic opportunity are least available to low-income students, who are disproportionately black and hispanic. 

Who to help

Education funding must be done in a way that “redistributes” opportunity to disadvantaged communities — to ensure that educational success in one group does not become generational. In other words, so that it remains truly meritocratic. This means funding the education of low income people to a much higher degree than higher income people.  This can be done by taxing federal educational benefits as income in a highly progressive income taxation environment.

How to control costs

Student educational funding must be done in a way that does not accelerate the massive inflation in educational costs… in other words, it cannot end up simply as a huge subsidy to educational institutions. Some kind of cost control must be put in place.

This might take the form of depriving institutions of federal funding if their tuition exceeds a level based on median household income, with adjustments tied to Cost Of Living.