Sure, that is the ROLE of the government. Why as a citizen would I plan how many doctors we need? Would you depend on MY guess of the number of engineers needed? ------------------------------- I tell you what, do the math: How many students can get a free college education by not building another nuclear submarine? Also, if you serve in the military, you can get a free college education, do you have a problem with that? Call your senator!
There are almost 200K American students taking advantage of the much cheaper or free European colleges. FREELOADERS, I say!
Also, if somebody hasn't got the memo: As of August 2022, about half of U.S. states offer free community college for students in some form, including: Arkansas California Connecticut Delaware Georgia Hawaii Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maryland Mississippi Missouri Montana Nevada New Jersey New York Oklahoma Oregon Rhode Island South Dakota Tennessee Utah Washington West Virginia
In some countries you write a test after high school. The results and your grades decide at which faculties are you eligible to apply. At the end, if you study law, and you cannot get a suitable job, you can always go and do sth else. At the end, market will decide. Also the doctors: there is a lack of specific doctors and we are actually importing them. Some of them, once they get free education, leave and never come back. Some return with knowledge from abroad.
The medical field is in crisis around the world; not enough nurses and doctors in planned or liberal economies. Also, it's difficult for practitioners to move around because not all countries accept each others training. The most challenging is getting doctors and nurses to work in difficult or remote areas. In the US where the cost of education is exorbitant and paid for by the student, it's very difficult for public hospitals or rural areas to hire at competitive wages which, for the nurse or doctor, includes paying off their college debt. In France, where government pays for medical school, there's the same problem on a different scale. Government controls wages and practitioners are paid maybe 30% of US wages and they complain of not getting paid enough. Government reminds them that their education was free but practitioners move to desirable areas to set up their private practice where they can compete for better wages. In effect, some areas have a surplus of doctors and nurses while others are alarmingly short. There are calls there to require doctors and nurses to work in government designated areas for at least 5 years after obtaining their license, as a form of repayment for their free education but that's not taken so well by the medical body that complains such requirement isn't applied to other careers and is simply going to discourage students from going into the medical field.... My point is, when facing scarcity, neither liberal nor planned systems seem to resolve limited distribution. Only surplus leads to full distribution.
I stil think it's not good for a society where a lot of people have no occupation, and thus high unemployment cannot exist for long. But maybe my imagination is too low. Sometimes smart 'outsourcing' to your customers is cheaper. For example, to replace cashiers, shop some chains (Amazon?) created shops which scan your basket when you leave the store. The largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands just let's customers scan their own baskets. For customers who don't pay, they only need 1 AI-dog:
It's funny to watch the talk about how the government should pay for it as an "investment" while ignoring: a) How much it costs. b) What the expected resulting wage is. c) The total lack of scaling of loans for various degree programs to the actual employment prospects for those fields. If you refuse to calculate the cost/benefit trade-off then it's not an 'investment', it's just another socialist pipe dream. Eventually, you would see everyone admitted to college to study anything they feel like, with virtually no academic rigor and the value of the resulting degrees would quickly trend towards zero. (E.G. your SUNY BS in "Canadian Studies" acquired at taxpayer expense.)
You're just repeating what others on this thread have said. Perhaps you just wanted to add your derogatory remarks? In any case, I detailed in several posts earlier my position on the matter and I enjoin you to read them. Perhaps the Australian model is more palatable to you?