Vis a vis something in the US thread, namely this
Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jul 25, 2024 9:07 am
Mercatus center wrote:These findings demonstrate that, far from achieving increased affordability and accessibility, free college tuition actually pushes college further out of reach for the poorest students, owing to the increased competition for placement.
This refers to Chile apparently introducing free tuition in 2014. The conclusion that free tuition means poor students have more trouble when tuition is free is extremely surprising. That's fine, there are plenty of counter intuitive findings in economics, but frankly this calls for a lot more detail.
first of all, chile does not, in fact, have free tuition. we have a policy that's called gratuidad, gratuity i guess?, but it is a benefit for specific people which has to be requested and vetted and there's a whole bureaucratic apparatus to which you send a request for it that will answer yes or no depending on a number of factors. I have a relatively solid understanding of this bureaucracy since a social worker very close to me routinely freelances for them during their periods of high workload.
the details of the specific requirements vary from year to year [we chileans love bureaucracy and numbers and stuff, did you know they ask you for your unique government ID when you buy like a can of arizona or something? yes, even in convenience stores sometimes] but the broad strokes are as such: you have to be "in the lower 60% of homes by income", already be accepted to some uni undergrad program or something, not have a college degree already, not be behind on your studies if you're already a college student [i.e. if your degree nominally takes 3 years, not be in your fourth year], and be either a chilean or a foreign national with residency papers.
of course each and every one of these conditions has a bunch of clauses, subclauses, exceptions, justifications, and strategies that will permit you to avoid them or work around them. as an example of a real case, someone may make decent money, or even amazing money, and still get it (right wings politicians are famous for it): all they need to do, is to have their kid go live with their grandma, since a household is a household: they can also write in the application that they do, no one's gonna check. if granny's pension is pennies, as is the case for most old people, then you're in the lower 60% unless your kid themselves work. you may be in your fourth year of a 3year degree, as long as you justify that you had, say, some significat disease through papers doctors give you. you can be a bit over that 60% lower income household threshold, as long as you can credibly ascribe, through your dad's medical bills for example, that enough of that money went to his medicines. I've rumm4ged around the syst3m gov3rnment 3mployees use to qualify these cases and the sheer volume of ifs, thens and elses that go into the decision of "yes, give gratuity to this fellow" or "no, don't give it to this other fellow" were staggering. As I understand it, fulfilling the formal conditions mostly guarantees access to the benefit, though, but it's not hard to get something wrong, to forget to upload some paper, or make some other procedural error: there's an appeals process for that, but i understand the success rate for requests is lower than 80%. all in all, college in chile is not, in fact, free: there's just a scholarship program the government runs whose name suggests so: you need to fulfill conditions, get good grades, blablabla, and most students don't have it free.
in 23, about 40% of students in university (we have no college-uni distinction here) had gratuity. there's all sorts of other benefits, each with a different bureaucratic processes and stables of freelance bureaucrats involved, but their relevance has declined: most of the benefits students get are gratuity cause, hell, which one would you like, a 2%-a-year-loan for 30k, for example, or not paying for college in the first place.
I don't know for sure, but it wouldn't be totally surprising if the effect the market fundamentalists find here was at least somewhat correct: at least here, and likely everywhere, school grades and standardized test scores are strongly correlated with parental educational achievement, parental income, neighbourhood of residence and other indicators of socioeconomic status so if college is free, and you get into it based on your grades, then you'll have the rich kids getting in at higher rates than the poor kids do, especially to the top universities: this is a known effect. recently it's been decreed that schools that get public funding cannot select kids [you know, say stuff like 'of the three kids that are applying, imma take the two with the best grades' etcetera], which should reduce this effect in the next 30 years or so through reducing the delta in quality of education you get between rich and poor, though not to that big a degree since there's still gonna be private schools around. chile is in a perpetual state of extremely slow educational reform, so who knows what's gonna happen.
before gratuidad our main model of financing university was, much as in the US, predatory loans that often burden people for their entire lives. This had the slight benefit of being more or less universal, moreso than gratuidad at least, since no matter how poor you were the banks were happy to lend to the 30kusd (in a country with a median wage of 0.5kusd, mind you) you needed to study whatever it was, since the loans were originally at 7% per year and if you defaulted the state would pay them anyway, leaving you in the second-class-citizen category of person in the privately-administered list of debitoribus of the republic. lately it's become much easier to get out of that list, named Dicom, partly because so many people were in it as a result of these loans as to make some important political pressure, so when I went to college the deal was anyone could get into college, a good one or a bad one depending on your grades, as long as you either get the big loan, Crédito con Aval del Estado, you get some other kind of loan... you know, just a student loan, from a bank if you didn't qualify for CAE, or you could not get a loan and just go if your parents were well off or better, half a median wage or so. it was, like all neoliberal policies, ultimately a scam to put public money in the pockets of rich cunts, and coincided with literal malls opening banks in order to capitalize on it: the whole scam was hatched by son of a whore 'center-left' 'socialist' politician Ricardo Lagos, to bipartisan acclaim. it was a scam, but it worked in the sense of making
access to university education, or technical education, practically universal. moreover, bad unis were a lot cheaper back then. honestly, everything was.
so i'd have to check the actual study to say if it's true or false that access went down after '14, but it could have: at the very least I don't know if the proportion of poors who access higher education has gone up or down since gratuidad, but it wouldn't be surprised if it was the same, and honestly I'd be somewhat surprised if it was higher. my guess is whatever the direction, the effect size is a low one. of course, that's just access: *harm* is much lower now, since gratuidad kids can try our programs without burdening themselves with a hundred median incomes worth of debt at 21, and I hear as many tearful accounts of "my son is the first university graduate in our family" in focus groups as I used to hear when I was an undergrad 15 years ago. as in the us, the mass forgiving (what's the word? a pardon? we call it condonación) of these loans is a promise the 'center-left' routinely shouts during campaign, only to renegue on it when in power, to bipartisan acclaim.
As for the reason why people tend not to go for "vocational" training and opt for university degrees instead, that's easy: they're much less prestigious, the quality of education is much lower in general (like, shitty teachers and, for example, literal ethics classes where they're told about god, about how abortion is bad and about how taking medical leave is the behaviour of losers and thieves, i swear I'm not being poetic here). in addition, most government jobs require university degrees, as well as most managerial jobs, even in the few heavy industries we have, so studying a technical degree means, sure, maybe you'll spend less money and do as well or better than your uni compadres, but then again, your career is probably at its peak six years after you graduate, or will have to get an ingeniería in something in order for you to be, say, a low level manager, instead of a 24 year old nepo baby with a uni degree in business administration. In addition, university is the dream most kids, and especially most poor kids, grow up hearing their parents tearfully hoping for them: no one tells their kid "I want you to have what I didn't have, so hopefully you'll study hard to become an electrician".