Governments should offer college and university education free of charge to all students

Free tuition for a college education seems desirable in order to achieve the goal of freedom of receiving higher education. Especially, college students in the United States have been suffering from high college tuition and fees – a profound and prevalent social issue. However, does offering higher education free of charge yield positive results in general? The given prompt states that governments should offer college and university education at no charge to all students. I strongly disagree with this claim for two reasons.

First of all, a complimentary college education may undermine the motivation of students. Specifically, if students pay no to little tuition and fees for college, they take receiving higher education for granted. As a result, they are less likely to make much out of the educational resources provided on campus, which leads to less fruitful and effective learning at college. For instance, students who pay less than a thousand dollars per year are less likely to invest their effort and time than those who pay more than ten thousand dollars annually. Since the latter has to compensate for high college tuition, they are much more likely to strive to utilize campus resources, such as office hours, recitation, and research projects, in order to accumulate priceless experience commensurate to the amount of tuition and fees they paid to the college or university. Hence, providing college education free of charge may hinder students to delve into college life and make wonderful accomplishments during the college year.

Secondly, it is unrealistic for the government to offer free college education to all students. The government typically needs billions of dollars to implement this plan in the United States. However, the budget for higher education should be significantly increased in order to cover the additional, exorbitant expense. Eventually, it is inevitable for the government to raise the overall taxes at a higher rate in order to compensate for the increased educational expense to offer free college education to all students. This might lead to the overall depression of the economy in the United States, which is a huge loss to execute the proposal. Therefore, offering free higher education to all students may lead to a negative outcome that outweighs the positives.

There might be some claims that providing free higher education is not totally unviable, coming up with examples of Denmark, Norway, and Finland. These nations have been the exemplar of the countries that provide a free college education. Hence, some people argue that if other countries follow the same or similar path compared to the Northern European nations, they may offer a complimentary college education to all domestic students. However, those three nations have been able to provide higher education free of charge due to the abundant resources produced on their lands, which enabled them to afford to offer free college education to their students. However, the situation in the United States differs from that in those nations. For instance, the United States has the third largest territory and population in the world, which make it very difficult to offer free college education to all students. Furthermore, there are an insufficient amount of natural resources or other means of production to resort to in order to fill in the additional expense. Due to the different context and circumstances in which the United States is placed, compared to the nations in the Scandinavian Peninsula, offering free college education seems highly unlikely.

In conclusion, governments should not provide higher education at no cost to all students due to the detrimental effect on students’ motivation to learn and economic drawbacks due to the enormous increase of educational expenditure to the execution of the proposal. Furthermore, merely imitating what other nations do is not the sagacious way to improve the nation; it is impervious to consider overall factors and variables to decide the best policy.