This made me laugh.

Is free college even a realistic thing? How would they finance it anyway? Do you think that eventually we will do away with actual onsite campuses and all college degrees will be online?

Obviously it's not actually free. Of course all the 'free stuff' would be paid for by increased taxes, but the idea is that the people who would be taxed more are the people that can afford it. So wealthier people would see a tax increase.

Alternatively we could just re allocate our current tax spending without raising taxes. Just funnel some of the money we spend on the military and prisons into education and healthcare and there you go.

So no, none of the stuff Sanders is talking about would actually be 'free,' it would be paid for by taxes as those things currently are and have always been. But that doesn't have to mean average joes paying 90% of their income in tax, or whatever nonsense the republicans are telling you it means, there are other places to get the money for those things from.

I work as a professor, I've seen the budgets at my institution. To have free college, the government would have to pay a lot (something like $15000 more than they already pay per student per year more than they already pay). It seems very unrealistic to me. And that's conservative.

I doubt all college degrees will be online. Even if it becomes a majority, some institutions will have demand for centuries (for example Harvard, Stanford).

Enrique, in your opinion, do Universities use money efficiently ?

Faculty compensation isn't super high so I am not sure where the money is going.

He can chime in as well, but the answer is no virtually everywhere. There has been massive administration bloat that far outpaces any increases in students or faculty. Campuses have been competing more by remodeling luxury facilities than on price.

Back then, there was no electricity, but I'll play along and say this is true.

What else did the unions do?

Workermans union went to San Fransisco and burned down thousands of Chinese and Japanese owned businesses.

When the men came back from WW2, Molly got fired.

Unions have not, historically, been kind to women and minorities. They not only restricted them from jobs, they fought against suffrage and eqaul rights laws.

The revisionism is so quick and so deep that we forget that the UAW and UFCW was founded by Jimmy Hoffa and the mafia, who we all know had questionable business tactics. We also forget that Caesar Chavez was staunchly against the very people who flood the streets to celebrate him.

unions have done a lot to stymie techological progress, even to the health of the workers it supposedly defends.

When it came time to renegotiate, unions said that people should get paid $40 per hour to tighten screws and told the companies to hand more money to keep them around. The companies said **** off and left.

I think my institution does a nice job of being efficient. We don't have a bloated administration, most of the administrators have "many hats".

At my institution around 65% of the cost is "salaries and benefits". Other costs include infrastructure, funding student organizations (this costs more than I expected).

I am at a small college, so most classes are small (although, being a math professor, I get a lot of the "big" classes with 25 to 30 students). With the student to faculty ratio being small, it means that students have to pay a lot to have professors get competitive salaries.

Marc Cuban was on CNBC the other day saying exactly this. He said when he donated money to his alma matter it was with a stipulation that it not be used to build anything new but could only be used to upgrade current facilities.

He is also of the belief (as am I) that the main reason for spiraling education costs are too much easy money in the way of student loans. He suggests a cap of 30K on student loans which he believes with make tuition costs plummet. As long as all of that money is out there the universities will grab it.

Ok, how about this modern day where we have people in third world countries working in dangerous conditions and for 'slave' wage pay similar to what many Americans were working for here 100 years ago.

If we had never had any unions, or labor laws passed as a result of union pressure what would make it so we still wouldn't see jobs of that type in this country? Clearly electricity isn't an argument because they have electricity in China and people are working in those dangerous conditions for that 'slave' wage pay right now, today 2016.

If the U.S. had never had Unions or passed labor laws, what's to say we wouldn't still have those jobs, conditions and pay here?

Nothing so far as I can see.

The unions were needed because we didn't have the labor laws we have today. Now that we have these laws, the unions are obsolete.

But now we get to the cyclical nature of history. We have a problem. We come up with a way to fix that problem. We determine the problem is fixed. We thusly decide we don't need the thing that fixed the problem anymore, so we axe it. Then some number of years later (and often not all that many,) we seem to forget the problem we had before and recreate the circumstances that led to it being a problem in the first place. We then have the problem again. Now we need to come up with a fix. We come up with that fix successfully. Now the problem is no longer a problem, so we can get rid of that which we used to fix it. Then some number of years later...


If that's the way it has to be, then maybe that's the way it has to be, but man wouldn't it be better if we could just learn from our mistakes one time and not repeat them anymore? Sure seems like it.

Maybe unions don't serve much purpose now, but if you axe them entirely, one day not too far down the road employers will successfully convince lawmakers to repeal those labor laws and now we're right back to square one and need the unions again.

Right, but you are forgetting that unions lost more battles than they won, which was mostly a good thing for equality and worker safety.

Unfortunately, we can't coerce other countries to implement our flavor of human rights. It's an unfortunate consequence of globalization, and something that should have been enforced in trade deals and foreign companies doing business from America.

But we can do our part. Don't buy these things that are causing issues. Try to buy USA made... Actually, there are sweatshops here, so scratch that as well.

Yeah I know that, that we can only focus on out own country. I was just using those other countries as evidence that without labor laws those conditions and wages can still exist in the world of 2016.

Anyway, yes globalization, everything being on a world stage rather than a local stage certainly does make things a lot more complicated and complex, no doubt about that.

While I don't fully condone the practice, at least many of these other countries are getting some leg up on the world stage and their citizens are living more modern lifestyles. In many ways, the lives of others are improving. You can't really deny that truth.

This whole experiment is relatively new, and I don't think it will be the same 10 years from now. The changes are already showing. The days of buying from China at $1 landing are long gone. The days of getting programs made on the cheap from India are going the way of the dodo bird. At some point, everything is going to equalize, and I suspect it will happen quicker than it did in the USA.

Unions may have a number of black marks in their history when dealing with racial issues, but that is a problem with virtually every institution in the United States. That modern unions have a racism problem still, that racism is a problem inherent to unions, or that historic unions were substantially more racist than other institutions is not at all clear, even from these examples.

But capital will always have a negotiation advantage over labor. Labor is always selling an ephemeral good: time. If labor elects not to sell, they can't get those hours back or store them up for consumption when a better opportunity comes along. Furthermore, labor is always going to be people much closer to a state of duress at the bargaining table. They will always be much closer to eviction or starvation than the capital party, because that is why they are labor and not capital. The lower on the totem pole you go, the more there figures to be someone out there equally capable but more desperate and thus more willing to do the same work for less.

Labor laws are clearly an improvement and a good limitation on just how desperate someone can be w.r.t. workplace safety, etc., but having reduced the power of unions and not replaced them with anything else to try and rebalance negotiations between labor and capital, we see exactly what we see today: the capitalists at the top are able to extract 100x what they used to be able to without any of those gains passed on to the people who are actually doing the work.

That's true. I think America grew up in many ways over the 20th century, and I'm not entirely convinced that unions made a huge impact in either case. Even without unions, I'm sure children would not be working in dangerous factories today, and I think the march of technology and science would ensure safer work places. OSHA isn't a union, for example.

Unions were key players in pushing Congress to pass the bill that established OSHA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupa...ited_States%29

Laborers would not have had their voices heard without them.

Chrery picking a bit here, but...

Many labor leaders, including the leadership of the AFL-CIO, did not fight for the legislation, claiming workers had little interest in the bill.

People make it sound like Congress would have entirely ignored workers if it wasn't for the unions slamming down doors and busting kneecaps. In this case, the unions came around after dismissing the bills and they get all the credit?

I didn't give them all the credit, nor does the AFL-CIO passing on the first iteration mean that unions weren't important for the final result.

I don't agree with this point. I think tuition would go up. Let me explain with numbers. A college might price themselves as 40K a year. But the average student pays 18K a year because the college gives scholarships (sometimes based on merit, but more often based on financial considerations). If the loans would be capped, you might drop the average a student pays, but you will raise the tuition that's reported. Because to make up for that lost money, the college would have to charge more to the the people that can pay the full price. It might be a good idea to cap it, but it wouldn't drop tuition (at least not the one advertised).

I think people often think of the cost of colleges based on the price advertised as opposed to the price an average student has to pay.

Another huge issue with college tuition costs is the removal of state support from education. Take the filter off of major research universities and you see that a lot of the state universities have really lost a lot of support.

http://chronicle.com/interactives/statesupport

More and more college programs will offer online as an option instead of expecting students to show up in a classroom. Students will jump at the opportunity. Tuition will continue to rise. Colleges will rake in the money, pay lower salaries to adjunct teachers, eliminate tenure positions, build fancy sports complexes, pay administrators huge salaries, pay people to travel here and there to promote their schools not only in the US but overseas (I know someone who does this). It's all happening now. Colleges will be mostly online in the future. Everybody will have a college education. shouldn't they? they have a right! I work with a lady who has a master's degree. She can't read or write, but she managed to get that degree! How was it in Idiocracy, didn't they receive their college degrees from Costco?

oh, and go unions! Long time supporter here. Me and the mister are both members of unions. We pay our dues. Has it helped us much? er,...hmm... let me think about that...wait... maybe they prevent us from getting fired maybe? I have noticed you can be a piss-poor employee and remain at your job for years if you belong to a union. Not that I'm like that mind you. I'm a damn hard worker.

Let me get this straight. You think the whole problem starts with doctors?

I'm not sure what to think about Obama Care. I mean from a selfish point of view, it pissed me off when both my (and my partner's) deductibles tripled. I hate change!! Can't we just go back to the way it used to be?

On the other hand, my sister and her family keep reminding me (over and over) that Obama Care has helped countless people who had no insurance and who had pre-existing conditions, who were denied insurance. This was terrifying to them. If you have not been in their shoes then you cannot know how scared they were. What do you say to people like my sister and her kids who keep reminding me that the impetus for change was to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions?

My coworker keeps telling me that he would gladly pay 5% more out of his paycheck if it would mean helping other people get the kind of health insurance they need to provide coverage for their family. He thinks everyone should have exactly the same coverage regardless of their job or their place in society. I think he is a good guy.

I would love to hear mark Cuban sit down with Bernie and explain this simple concept to him. I don't think Bernie would ever actually understand what he's saying, but it would be funny.