>The public in California, the vast majority of whom don't have a 4
>year degree and are working class, still do support increasing
>public universities as a high priority. But the upper-middle class
>students who populate the universities should be paying more of a
>user fee.
User fees would be a bad idea. It teaches a bad lesson to students: you pay for what you get, and what you get is what you've paid for. Education should be a public good even under capitalism. Moreover, higher education in the end gives much more economic benefit to capitalists who employ & extract surplus value from college graduates than graduates themselves (with the exception of college graduates who themselves become capitalists -- a very tiny minority). So, capital ought to bear the social costs of producing educated workers.
>pay later on through taxes if they earn a good income.
That's better. Raise taxes for the rich, lower taxes for the working class, stop the war on drugs, & restore state funding to education.
>I'm trying to remember which university it was that was proposing
>charging different tuition based on majors, and having a full
>reporting of average wage earned by alumni by major. It might have
>been the university of Washington. Clearly that would be untenable
>because people would do things like major in psychology and try to
>take as many computer science classes as electives as possible. It
>definitely makes sense for the graduate level.
If you created such explicit inequality among departments by charging different tuition fees based on the average economic values of different degrees, colleges & universities would definitely be much readier to abolish majors that could command only very low tuitions than now.
Yoshie