College or university education is very competitive in modern society due to increasing challenges in life. Nearly all students, parents, and countries are struggling to ensure that they improve quality and quantity of human resources at respective levels of development.
Currently, education is the only key to improving quality and quantity of human resources in the society. Therefore, education is increasingly becoming competitive with time due to unlimited resources that deny many students the chance to continue with their college or university education. Despite the insufficient resources that deny many students to continue with their education, college or university education tuition should not be free.
College or university education should not be free because it will lead to compromised quality of education. Normally, educational institutions are in classes that offer varied quality of education based on their resources and facilities. Thus, parents have freedom to choose where to take their children depending on their economic statuses. The poor take their children to lower class educational institutions and the rich take their children to high-class institutions.
Hence, making education tuition free means that there will be no hierarchy of educational institutions since all of them offer same quality of education. Eventually, it will lead to compromised quality of education because educational institutions will lose the competitive spirit that comes with classes in society. In the view of compromised quality of education, tuition fee should not be free.
Offering free college or university education is an additional strain to government resources. The number of students who are currently in colleges or universities is very small compared to many who cannot afford tuition fees. This means that making tuition free will lead to exponential increase in the number of students who will strain the available educational resources and facilities in colleges and universities.
Therefore, the government will not only incur tuition fees, but also the costs necessary for the expansion of educational facilities to cater for the increasing demands of the students. Thus, tuition fee should not be free because the fee contributes significantly to the development of educational facilities and saves the government the trouble of spending lot of resources.
Moreover, making tuition free to free is encouraging parents and students to be irresponsible in matters of education. If parents experience the pain of paying for education, they will ensure that their children utilize any opportunity they get, but if the tuition is free, parents will not care about educational progress of their children. In addition, students will not take their education seriously since they will lose nothing except the free opportunity they enjoy.
Since education costs parents great deal of resources and is an investment, they take time in ensuring that their children achieve the most and improve their future lives. Hence, tuition fee should not be free for it encourages irresponsible behaviors of parents and students.
Finally, due to the increasing rate of unemployment across the world, it does not make economic sense for a government to provide free education yet there is no employment. The government should create more job opportunities before thinking of offering free college or university education.
If the government empowers people economically, they will take care of their educational needs and there will be no point of offering free tuition. Thus, in the light of the compelling points given in this paper, the government should not offer free tuition in colleges and universities.