Free education, costly option: why I don’t think education should be free

I see the discussion of tuition fee in the air again and having just had a chat with a Norwegian friend who was enrolled in the same study program at the same time as I was in Oslo but opted to transfer to study in the US, I suddenly found something to reflect on and something to discuss.

The current practice in Norway is that education is free, for both Norwegians and international students. The admission is easy for Norwegians unless they want to get into one of the very few highly competitive study programs such as medicine at UiO. Other than these very few programs, a Norwegian student never need to think what to do if his application get rejected. Money matters only if he wants to study in the private universities such as BI (still not expensive) or abroad. For international students, it is slightly more difficult, in the sense that you have to prove you have enough money to survive, which sounds reasonable. However, just to get admitted into a study program is much easier in Norway than in many other countries because Norwegians have the philosophy that education should be available to everyone, not be a privilege to limited few.

The consequence is … For most Norwegian students, because the education is “free”, they don’t have to think too much before they decide what to study. When they study, they don’t talk much about jobs after graduation. That sounds too materialistic, isn’t it? They come to party and the generous student benefit, the government sponsored student loans and the abundant (well-paid) part time job opportunities keep them on campus for years. On the other side, in countries where education is expensive, for example, the US, students may have their whole career planned before they start their undergraduate study since they have to make the pay-back plan for their student loan.

For international students, except those who study subjects for which some Norwegian institutes are truly a world leader, such as marine engineering, most of the students come without much academic ambition. Some come when they can’t get or afford a place anywhere else. Some come to experience a different climate and nature. Among the Chinese students in Oslo, some go shopping of luxury handbags once every month in Paris. Their choice of Norway is at least partly based on the Schengen agreement and partly on the easy admission and zero rejection rate of visa application. Some come to deliver newspapers… In a word, I rarely meet people who are academically ambitious.

Since both Norwegian students and international students are not highly motivated, the classrooms can sometimes be very quiet. In the economics classes I went to, lecturers see no point of encouraging discussion and debate, not to mention competition. This might offer the freedom to the students who know what they want, but to the majority of students who need a kick in the ass, the wake-up call never comes and they graduate to be the kind of people that can work in a same position for 20 years.

For the country to be competitiveness in the long term without the unpredictable winning of oil lottery, it needs competitive work force which comes from world-class education. That is why I believe the education should not be free, the admission should be much more strict, and the quality of education should be constantly examined and improved. What if smart but poor (especially non-Norwegian) kids can’t afford it? Simple. Giving them a scholarship rather than waiving the tuition for everybody. And … the awarding of scholarship should be performance-based rather than politically correctness.