^I think plenty of people do go to university on a whim. I'm not saying this is true of everyone, but I've met plenty of people for whom higher education was simply the path of least resistance after secondary education. It should be payed for through loans, which can be repaid with the higher earnings that graduates enjoy. If taking out a loan to pay for your degree doesn't make economic sense for you, then it shouldn't fall on your peers to subsidise it. It means that your academic endeavours are better suited to being a pastime than a career.
In Australia under the HECS system the state funds part of your degree, and then you pay it back on a sliding income scale after you are making enough money to afford it. This is a good system, but tuition fees only make up around half of the money that universities make (depending on the university). The rest comes from grants from the private sector, grants from the public sector, and state subsidies to make research which is not immediately economically viable possible (and thus have actual academia rather than an institution which just researches what the private sector wants it to research.)
I don't see why you think the opportunity should be provided to anyone who wants it; education is a good that must be paid for, just like anything else. You don't have a god-given right to a degree. I'm not disputing that education is beneficial to society as a whole, but I am arguing that this is not sufficient justification to coercively extract funds from citizens to cover the cost. Public funding and universal access does not lead to the higher academic standards that you and I would both like to see; as I said, just look at France.
Education is not just a good. Education is a social process with important stratifying effects for society as a whole. We have a political dispute here: what I call taxation in order to have some kind of society in which the inequalities that markets produce and institutionalise are tempered by the state, you call coercive extraction of funds from citizens.
Also: France has one of the most highly stratified and elitist educational systems in the West. The issue is not just where the money comes from, but also the structure of the education system. Germany is another example of a highly stratified education system which nevertheless gets comparatively well funded by the state, because of the way the system is structured.
Nevertheless, an education system which is well publicly funded is an absolute must if education is going to be anything other than an institution reinforcing middle and upper class privilege. The enormous class related difference between public and private sector education in the United States is a perfect example of this and a lesson on why market forces fuck things like education up completely.
I agree that there is more pressure on academics, but this is surely a symptom of the huge rise in the number of students. That is because subsidising a good causes an artificially low price, thus causing demand to outstrip supply. If everyone paid the actual cost of the service provided, there would be fewer students, and thus academics would be free to get on with what is actually important, i.e. academia.
The reason there are more students at university now is because the youth labour market completely collapsed in the 1980s across all of the "first world" countries. This was related to the large decline in low skilled manufacturing jobs available to working class people, and is reflected in the level of subsidies these kinds of industries now receive from the state in order to prevent large scale unemployment of people without degrees. The result of all this is that there are no decent jobs for young people today, so they go to university in the hope of being able to secure a decent job in the future, as well as (hopefully) to expand their minds and get some new perspectives on how their world works. This has resulted in 'educational inflation' where a degree now is worth less than it was. This is unavoidable, and a result of the interaction between the labour market and the value of education (as a good in the economic sense).
Making going to university more difficult by forcing people to pay for it up front won't solve any of these problems. It will just result in a less well educated population which is less able to adapt to changing economic conditions. It will also exacerbate the already very strong class effects that you can clearly see in educational achievement. Ultimately there is no upside to this.
I don't recall saying that " subsidising education with taxes is just society subsidising people to fuck around and do nothing". I just believe state funding to be an unfair and inefficiency-promoting system. If you can make the argument to people that subsidising education reduces inequality and raises welfare, by all means convince them of this and get the funds voluntarily.
The most efficient education system would be if we just sent all of our students into a room and handed them a degree without teaching them anything. But I doubt either of us wants to see that kind of "streamlining" or "rationalisation." There is nothing unfair about subsidising education. We live in a society with entrenched inequality and the rich should have to give up some of their money in order to give the poor opportunities which education (sometimes) brings. And quite frankly I don't give a fuck if they don't want to. Rich kids will do well at school regardless because they will have a stable background and go to a well resourced private school. So they can pay for some of the privilege that comes with being upper class in an unequal society by giving up some of their money to help those people whose poverty makes their wealth possible.
People often don't want to drive responsibly either but we force them to for the public good. People often don't want to pay taxes, but we force them to anyway because otherwise the state would not be able to exist. Education is not just a commodity, it is a vitally important social process which can make a huge difference in the overall welfare of society and if people don't want to contribute to it well fuck them, they'll have to just like they have to contribute their taxes to making roads, funding the courts, and providing unemployment benefits for those who occupy the most structurally disadvantaged positions in society.
Edit: Holy shit what a massive post. Oops!
