杀G小组第四次作业贴

wagner1985UID: 2838595

12) Governments should offer a free university education to any student who has been admitted to a university but who cannot afford the tuition.
Write a response in which you discuss your views on the policy and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider the possible consequences of implementing the policy and explain how these consequences shape your position.

wagner1985UID: 2838595

In general, offering a free university education can benefit the whole country in many respects. However, it is also likely to cost a huge amount of resource for both government and universities, which should not be overlooked by the leaders. Therefore, whether or not a country should implement this policy depends on the situation of a country, such as budget, development of economy, comparative advantages and so forth.

To begin with, one of the obvious benefits brought by this policy is an increasing number of people who would like to study in university, which means a huge investment on human resource. Discharging tuition fees can encourage more people who did not want to go to university before to change their mind and turn to fetch the opportunities of being educated, which can fuel the growing human resources. As some economists point out, the more advanced human resources a country, the higher speed the economic growth of this country will enjoy in the future. For those countries without obvious competitiveness beside labor cost, this policy can contribute a lot to their booming economy in the future, giving them a promising future.

This policy also benefits other students who are not excellent enough to get scholarship. Before this policy taken into practice, some students from those families that can afford the expense of studying in universities but merely keep head above water have to do some part-time jobs in their leisure time to earn enough money in order to pay for their living expense and tuition fee. Therefore, these students cannot spend much time as they want on studying, which affects their mark in every course they took. With the help of this policy, these students can focus on their study and try to learn more. As a result, these students will have more knowledge than before, which is conductive to finding a good job after graduation.

However, people have to pay attention to one of the biggest disadvantages of this policy, which is leading to heavy financial burden. If every student in a country is exempt from charge, then there must be someone who pays for the bill. It is a huge amount of cost for a government as well as a university, especially in developing country. Obviously, not all of governments and universities can get enough money without implementing some shortsighted policy. So, to financing this policy, they possibly reduce some service which they provided before, fire some employee, spend less on national defense or security, even cut the number of students admitted in university every year, which is more likely to offset the benefit mentioned above. One more cent spent on this policy, one less cent that can be used on other purposes, which are related with the well-being of people. For those developing countries, this policy is too luxury and lavish to be supposed to be taken into practice.  

To sum up, to evaluate this policy, the government have to take into consideration the plus and the minus. In some developed country, government and university are rich enough to afford this policy, so it is advisable to implement this policy. While in other countries, it is not.