A good education is commonly considered to be the foundation of professional growth and financial success in life. High-quality education is also core to self-fulfillment as it allows developing skills and realizing own talents and potentials. Therefore, it may be argued that education at the secondary level should be free in order to provide everyone with similar opportunities. However, the lowering of prices for education could be a more realistic solution in the present-day situation.
It is possible to say that free education is in line with the concept of social justice. The principle of distributive justice is basic in many social theories and implies a fair allocation of resources among all members of the population. Education may be viewed as such an essential resource, and, unfortunately, a lot of people currently have no access to it due to high tuition costs. Since high-quality education provides one with competencies needed to improve their social-economic status, the fact that to study at a college, a person needs to pay a substantial amount of money prevents those in the most vulnerable position from changing their social location. Of course, history knows many stories of poor people becoming rich, yet these cases are rather exceptional. At the same time, free education could help to better the quality of life for people in difficult economic situations on a significantly larger scale.
Overall, although free education seems to be an ideal solution to the problem discussed above, it is not necessarily easy to realize it in reality without impacting the quality of education negatively. Top universities and colleges substantially rely on fees to purchase all necessary resources, recruit the best professionals, and advance students’ learning experiences in all possible ways. To compensate for all these massive investments, the government will need to show strong commitment and dedication to an idea of high-quality, free education and change its funding and financing strategies, respectively. Thus, regardless of all its potentially favorable outcomes, it seems unrealistic to make college education absolutely free. However, a significant reduction in tuition fees could still be viewed as an option.