As a society, should we offer a free university education to the truly gifted, say the top 5%?
The best investment any culture can make is in education. As to wheather it is better to educate only a small % of those likely to be most successful is debatable. The more educated the population as a whole is, the higher the GNP of a country. However, the educated must have a source of reward after expending the time & money (be it theirs or the country’s) to obtain said education. The US is suffering an economic melt down due to lack of jobs for those that get degrees in the science & engineering fields (the investor class sent those jobs to China.) Not only is infrastructure necessary to insure cultural success, an educated work force is needed to make it work. People can be taught to develop an inquiring mind & research situations, any nation that doesn’t realize this is destined for failure & obscurity. Invest in education & invest as much as possible.
Coming from a part of England that still has the 11+ I can say that the top 5% will not get in free but those whose parents can afford tutors to teach them how to pass exams! Also, how do you decide? Someone who is hopeless at maths could be a fantastic historian or amazing at languages. At the moment, even though there A Levels are seen as getting easier, it is a benchmark which you have to get over to get into uni. As a 40 year old in uni, I think that prospective students should have some life experience first – I do find some of the more immature 18 year olds are babies! I’m amazed they can even wipe their own backsides! We had one who wanted to do a history presentation on important people in the 20th century on the Olsen twins!!!! Saying that, many are very mature but knowing what life is like in the big world would be a major advantage to most of them.
No. If they are truly gifted (top 5%), then they should easily be able to pay for their education with a loan, and then get a good job to pay off the debt. So maybe we should offer low-interest educational loans, or maybe some scholarships to the top 5%, but not totally free university education. If anyone is capable of paying for their own education, it should be the most gifted people who are capable of doing it. Or, maybe we can offer free university education for the gifted students who plan to use their education to serve the government/country. Because it would be good to have educated, talented people in charge. So maybe we could have free university education to truly gifted students who COMMIT to working for the government for X number of years after graduation. That way, we can get more talented and educated government officials. But if the gifted students are planning to take their free education and go straight into the private sector to make money for themselves alone, the
