I don't believe some disciplines should be given preferential treatment over others. As for the financing of education, I believe it should be free for all who can qualify academically. There is precedent for this: I don't have children but I do not complain about paying school taxes, it is part of what I feel I owe my country.

Actually, it's a moot point, because education is already free. Even if you go to a first-rate private Ivy League college, pay full tuition and fees and and accept no financial aid; the bulk of your education is already financed by external agencies, public and private, through grants, direct subsidies, foundations, trusts, and so forth. No body actually pays the full costs of their college education. What we DO pay is the price of admission so we can share in and benefit from all these goodies. Those who can come up with the entrance fee get the full benefit of socialized education. If you can't afford it, you don't get in, unless you borrow. In the state schools, its the same, only more so.

The reason even a highly-subsidized college education is still so expensive is to make sure that only those who can afford to get in and share this bounty do so. It's a way to keep out the hoi polloi. It works sort of like flood insurance, if you can afford a seashore house on the Outer Banks, the government chips in and helps you buy storm insurance at rates no underwriter could possibly match for such a risky location, and which no bank would be willing to finance a mortgage for. Of course, those of us who cannot afford even those subsidized premiums don't get a chance to participate in the program. We all get to participate in paying for it, though.

I wasn't the first person in my family to go to college, my grandfather, although from a working class family, attended the University of Havana Medical School in the early years of the 20th century simply because he passed the entrance examinations. I was the first person in my family to finish college. There is no way I could have even considered doing so
without my deceased father's VA benefits and my own GI Bill. This, plus working construction in the summers (one of those "jobs no American is willing to do") got me through at a state school without having to go into debt. No wonder the 60s were so turbulent, it was the first time in history that the working class got educated in substantial numbers.

I am where I am and do what I do and know what I know, and believe what I believe to a very great extent because of the Welfare State. I would be a bloody hypocrite to deny others that same advantage just to keep my taxes down. Like I said, I owe it to my country.