Subsidizing education would help alleviate economic barriers without exhausting government funds.
The argument
Running public tertiary institutions is expensive, and this argument treats that cost as the fact any funding model has to confront. Subsidising these institutions allows citizens to receive an affordable education without pretending the expense disappears — it is shared rather than removed. The argument concedes the obvious objection: a subsidised system may not be as equitable as free tertiary education, because socio-economic disparities mean the remaining share is not equally affordable to everyone. But it holds that there are ways to work around this, such as need-based financial aid programmes, which direct relief to the students for whom the residual cost is actually a barrier rather than lowering the price for everyone alike. The positive case concerns what the shared cost buys. A large aspect of tertiary education is learning from experienced, intelligent, successful individuals through seminars and other events, and splitting the cost between the government and the student results in a larger budget than either source would provide alone, allowing more of these interactive learning experiences to be offered. The same logic applies to the institution's own finances. Public US tertiary education institutions spend the majority of their budget on instruction and auxiliary expenses, and those auxiliary expenses help the institutions to generate alternative revenue streams to tuition. Money from those streams can be reinvested back into the institution, providing students with cutting-edge technology and resources at a low cost — so the spending that is not instruction is what keeps instruction from depending on tuition alone. That is why the argument frames affordable tuition as a user fee rather than as a price: it provides the institution with the necessary capital to keep resources up to date and relevant, which is what makes affordable education sustainable rather than merely cheap in the short term.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Though affordable education is sustainable, socio-economic factors will put lower-income students at a disadvantage. Need-based financial aid programs can also lack substantial funding or take the form of student loans, which is less than ideal.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Some governments may not have the necessary capital to fund public tertiary education to this extent.