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Student Union
Dallas Walker |
A free university education
is worth what you pay for itRecently, while discussing a prospective faculty strike here at the University of Hawaii in one of my classes, we came upon the subjects of the Legislature and politics, each tying into one common theme: tuition. Many students in the lecture hall welcomed the idea that certain parties would promote the elimination of tuition, with the idea that a university education should be a chartered right available to anyone. While a free university education appears, at first glance, to be a step toward improving the standard of living in Hawaii, deeper scrutiny shows it is not.
As a rule, money is a medium through which quality is guaranteed. The commodity that is purchased is always of superior quality to the commodity that is given. Several nonprofit organizations accept donated vehicles, which they sell for money to support certain causes. How do those donated vehicles compare with new or used vehicles bought from car lots? Downloaded music is never of better quality than that on a newly purchased CD. Why are there successful, dominating private high schools in Hawaii, while the public school system maintains an ameliorating, yet less successful scheme?
Since a commodity is consistently of higher quality when it is bought, why is there a movement for free university education? When the university education system goes the way of the donated vehicle, the downloaded music and the Hawaii public high school, we will ask, "Why?" and, just like the landlord, the file sharer and the school administrator, they will say, "Why do you complain? You paid nothing for it."
When the responsibility of private ownership of a commodity, that is investment in or the purchase of it, is taken away from someone, he or she will, as a process of human nature, build an ambivalence toward the commodity itself. We wonder why teenagers cause more automobile accidents than anyone. One reason very well could be that most do not buy the cars they drive. Perhaps it is not so unruly to think that anyone who works every day after school to save up for a car and buys a used two-door rusty-mobile will take better care of it than of any new sports car bought for him by another party. Is it so unnatural for someone who has spent a thousand dollars on a 65-piece CD collection to care better for the music than someone who has spent $20 on the same collection, just downloading it onto blank discs for 30 cents a disc?
Again, the same applies to university education. If the responsibility for ownership of this commodity is taken from the students, they will develop a natural apathy for it. With students already skipping class -- probably because their parents are footing the bill -- what would stop every classroom from being empty when a university education is free? Nothing would stop students from saying, "I can fail this class. I'll just take it again next semester." Furthermore, what would stop a student from taking one class a semester and graduating in 20 years? At what point does "free" stop? All of this contributes to inefficiency and to a huge waste of tax money.
Because it would lower the quality of education and require heavy tax levies while creating a system of inefficiencies, a gratis university education would be a degenerate step in a quest for a higher standard of living. Programs such as student loans might be a better approach. With loans, the onus is still placed on the student to do well and the university still gets its money, but the student is momentarily freed from the burden of tuition. In effect, the student learns to be responsible and becomes motivated to graduate and to get a decent-paying job to pay off the loans. If this happens enough, the standard of living in Hawaii can develop rapidly as the students become men and women of responsibility, not parasites of the state.
Dallas Walker is a University of Hawaii sophomore majoring in English.
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