Why college should be free

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Why college should be free". Your opponent's style: Elon Musk

I don't think college should be free it makes people lazy

Look, I get the work ethic angle, but you're missing the bigger picture here. When people have skin in the game financially, sure, but the real laziness is our broken system that's wasting human potential on a massive scale.Right now we have 43 million Americans drowning in $1.8 trillion of student debt [1]. That's not laziness - that's a system designed to extract maximum profit from human potential. When brilliant minds are spending decades paying off loans instead of innovating, we're wasting our most valuable resource. Free college isn't about making people lazy - it's about unleashing them. Look at every other advanced economy that figured this out decades ago. They're not producing lazy graduates; they're producing the engineers and scientists who are eating our lunch in renewable energy, AI, and space tech. When students aren't terrified of debt, they take bigger risks, start companies, pursue research that might not pay off immediately. Your "skin in the game" argument is backwards. The real skin in the game should be performance, not financial punishment. Make admission competitive, maintain high standards, but don't force the next generation to mortgage their futures just to participate in the knowledge economy.