Only if that $N cap must cover a minimum of near 100% of the salary could that even have an impact, IMO.
Without minimum coverage it's just a subsidy that will drive the cost of college up even more since every student would be able to afford a minimum of $N. It's virtually identical to the current loan landscape.
Example (broad strokes):
Student Grant / yr Minimum Coverage
$5,000 100%
$10,000 98%
...
$50,000 90%
Couple this with removing government backed student loans for undergraduate altogether and now you've got a reasonable out-of-pocket maximum spend per student per year. In this table it would be $5k for a $50k school - if the school wants any gov help they have to manage their own tuition costs.
Obviously this would be sort of a disaster at first and these numbers are probably silly, I have no clue what the process of coming up with these numbers and adjusting them (somewhat less than 1200% over 30 years) would even look like.
Sorry, I was unclear: the idea would be that a college that accepts the $N tuition would be prohibited from charging the students attending any additional tuition.
Note that this is how things work in many European countries (e.g. Sweden): universities cannot charge any tuition from students, but they get a certain amount of money per student from the government. This way the government can control the price exactly, so there are no risk of runaway tuition levels.
Yes, this happens, and it results in one of two (or both) logical reactions:
1) schools accepting any students and doing the filtering at the outflow instead, kicking out people that should not have passed the entry test after three years of studies.
2) schools lowering the bars and just pulling through them as many students as possible, because you need a lot of balls to do 1) and there are not that many balls in academic environment
The correction mechanism is twofold, and in-place throughout Europe: a) Universities must publish employment statistics with indicators for salaries at different horizons; b) Students have k years of extra runway to graduate or drop out. Dropouts cost school budget.
They correct both errors. One almost immediately, the other when/if the market recognizes low graduate quality.
> schools accepting any students and doing the filtering at the outflow instead
I'm not arguing that anybody be allowed to go to college on the public dime. There would need to be some sort of qualification involved. Otherwise we would see shoddy colleges pop up that admit everybody that applies.
What that qualification would be is another problem entirely of course...
> 2) schools lowering the bars and just pulling through them as many students as possible, because you need a lot of balls to do 1) and there are not that many balls in academic environment
In my opinion, this is already a significant problem in the US. Short of having standardized exams required to earn a degree (a bar exam for every discipline), it's not an easy problem to solve.
Without minimum coverage it's just a subsidy that will drive the cost of college up even more since every student would be able to afford a minimum of $N. It's virtually identical to the current loan landscape.
Example (broad strokes):
Couple this with removing government backed student loans for undergraduate altogether and now you've got a reasonable out-of-pocket maximum spend per student per year. In this table it would be $5k for a $50k school - if the school wants any gov help they have to manage their own tuition costs.Obviously this would be sort of a disaster at first and these numbers are probably silly, I have no clue what the process of coming up with these numbers and adjusting them (somewhat less than 1200% over 30 years) would even look like.