As a sophomore in college quickly realizing that my current major is very wrong for me, and facing the idea of 3 more years of college and summer classes, I'm coming to the realization that education should be free. Why should the one thing that will make us more successful, more educated, and less segregated be outrageously expensive and stressful? We come out of the harrowing experience of high school, only to be thrust into the real world. Either a struggle to find a job and support ourselves, or a struggle to pay for  college tuition. And not only tuition, but housing, required meal plans that are unhealthy and outrageously expensive, $100 iClickers to take quizzes with, $200 access codes for  online books, the $300 book that is not bound, but 3-holed and easily destroyed and not accepted for buy-back. Should I even mention that if the dining hall meals don't agree with you, you need to purchase or rent a micro-fridge unit and pay for groceries (on top of the required meal plan)? Or that my freshman housing gave me chronic sinus headaches and infections due to horrible ventilation and AC? Which I then had to pay $10 for every time I went to the health center and was forced to take a strep test "just in case". And once we graduate we will be drowning in bills and loans that we will be paying off for the majority of our lives, over worked at the jobs we went to college for in the first place. We need a college degree to get a job, but we need a job, to pay for said college degree. We then are so in debt, and still so uneducated about the important things like how to successfully manage your money, that we cannot afford our medical bills or insurance. Or living expenses, or then sending our children, who were probably born due to ignorance about sexual health, to school. And the cycle continues. The government is left to pay for the majority of this, including parts of education. I ask why? There is of course the issue that if schools had not reason to be better they would stagnete. That they need the structure of a capitalist market to make them strive for excellence, or at least attract students, to bring in more money, to make them a better school and so on and so forth. I'm not proposing a new system, because quite frankly I have no idea how to solve the problem without introducing more problems. But would a shift to free education and not free healthcare be possible? People would still be driven to become educated and work hard because it would be their only way of survival. And it would help them, not harm them. Those that could not support them selves would not survive as well. It seems barbaric in a way, but survival of the fittest and natural selection are not just limited to literal life and death survival of an organism. Those ideas are applicable in any situation where there is an inequality of individuals.