I too was told from an extremely young age that college was essentially a must. Everyone, regardless of ability or financial situation, it seemed, was destined for college. The public school I went to did little or nothing to expose us to other options. That's a crime. Students need to be made aware of the wide array of career routes they have as far trade school and skilled labor, as well as community college and whatnot. Not everyone was destined for college. It seems there's an argument somewhere for the public to subsidize state colleges more, which may help young people and the economy overall.
I like this idea a lot. Germany has had free college for a while. I spent the summer there, and the more I thought about it, the more astounded I was. As someone paying through the nose for a college education, it seems too good to be true that it could all be free. Not that we would ever make it free here, but it will be interesting to see what happens with higher education. Every year college becomes less and less viable for so many Americans. What's going to happen? Are prices going to reach a peak and then collapse, or will it just become impossible to go to school here without being incredibly wealthy? I don't know much about economics, certainly not enough to speculate, but it looks like something's going to have to give.
I was about to say something about Germany spending all their war money on education but then I looked it up and damn if Germany's education budget is the same as the United States'. I'm at a loss.
I'm not sure. The same has been said about our medical system and that's usually blamed on "inefficiency" but from what I've seen and who I've talked to (my wife used to be in medical benefits - some of her friends still have obnoxious titles like "VP" at places like Cedars Sinai), it's not that simple. As far as medical costs, a lot of it is related to the win-at-all-costs approach the United States takes to trauma. Not all, but a lot. As far as education, what I know of Germany's education system includes "tracking" of students a lot earlier. "High School" as I understand it is a lot more like vo-tech while "university" is a lot more like "grad school" as far as the students involved and the approaches taken. You also have to consider that post-war Europe was essentially set up by the Marshall Plan, via fiat, to craft a society that Truman & Co wanted the world to have. Egalitarianism was seen as a great solution to demagoguery and ethnic exceptionalism, which nobody wanted to see again. "University" went from being for the privileged elite to being for everybody; Tony Judt's "Postwar" has a great set of chapters on the economic and social upheaval that caused. The United States, meanwhile, was busily being built up by the GI Bill, fighting wars in Korea and Vietnam and reaping the benefits of a proxy empire. That all started crumbling in '76 and has been crumbling ever since. So I guess "inefficiency" is a way to look at it, but it seems like a lot more than that.