Governments should offer a free university education to any student who has been admitted to a university but who cannot afford the tuition.

Educational institutions are one of the utmost and critical part of a student’s life. To meet the growing demands of education and ever increasing number of students along with economic inflation, the cost of institutions have also gone quite high. This makes the situation more complicated for students who have lower socioeconomic status which lead to them making a choice between attending the university and piling up loans which they might spent their whole life paying back, or to not attend the university at all. They might even have qualified with merit which just means that a potential talent might be going to waste. Naturally, public will demand justice and equality for those unfortunate and the government will have to at some point will have to address the issue.

The purpose of the above statement is to bridge the discussion of how the government could step in to resolve the situation. They could provide funding to assist the students in need of financial help or might waive their fee all together. Not only this policy helps in increasing the socioeconomic status of lower class people it also increases the overall literacy of the nation and helps maintain higher threshold of talent in the university. To further illustrate my point, take the example of Kerela, a relatively poor state in the 20th century had rose to become a distinguished state in India over last decade. It has now hundred percent literacy thanks to its state government giving full financial aid to any student in need and promoting educational programs and exhibits all across the state. It culminated to the state producing large number of talented graduates in various fields of science and technology in the last decade.

However, there is also a lot many ways this policy could be exploited. For example, a university is also a profit-seeking corporation and getting funded by government may incite an institute to seek even more students to capitalize on the policy and make more money. This could lead to overwhelming amount of students which the institute might neither have the required number of faculty for nor the proper amount of resources. Declination in quality of education is apparent in this case which is just polar to what the policy was made for. Students, too, might be tempted to provide misleading or fraudulent information in hopes of getting scholarship in order to get free university education. Since the government does not hold unlimited resources, this might lead to retracting the policy bringing everything back to square one.

This leads to the dilemma of weighing the positive consequences with the negative and determining if the advantages is worth the risk of the loss. One possible solution may be that government should provide only limited amount of scholarship based on student’s need and it should be regulated by a third party to keep check on the respective student’s and the university’s background. This is to make sure no one could exploit the structure unrelentlessly so that the quality of the education could be maintained. The university should also have a strict criteria of the ratio between number of students, faculty and resources and should adhere to it by all means.

In conclusion, the policy in its bare bones format might be devastating to both the student and the government. The scarce government resources must be utilized in regulation and with proper screening of the affected parties such that exploitation is kept to bare minimum. Thus, the policy must be reviewed to achieve maximum benefit from it in the long run.