Should university studies be subsidized?

Hi everyone, I am Vimukthi from Sri Lanka and I am preparing for IELTS exam. Please make appropriate corrections to my essay.

Thank You

While government should pay for the primary and secondary studies, university studies should not be subsidized. To what extend do you agree or disagree?

Every nation spends a huge amount of money on education, because it has more benefits. Due to that reason primary and secondary education are compulsory in most countries.

A country can gain many benefits from having a proper education system and as well as educated citizens. It is easier for any country to expand its economy if it had an educated and efficient work force. Balancing act is the value of higher education for democracy. A healthy democracy requires civic engagement in both participation and leadership within government and civic organization.

To provide free primary, secondary and university education is not an easy task for any nation because it costs lot of public funds to maintaining and providing new facilities to its growing population. As an example my home country Sri Lanka provides free primary, secondary and higher education for all its citizens. There are many public schools in Sri Lanka which run by the government, and all universities are funding by the government .Sri Lanka annually spends 4% of its G.D.P, on free education, it's a lot of money for a developing county but that is the reason why our literacy rate is so high as a developed country, its 92% .

I think that every government must give an opportunity for its citizens to get access to the higher education otherwise it will be a luxury thing, because poor parents can't afford university fees. Its cost about three million rupees per student to complete university education in Sri Lanka, if parents had to pay half of the fees, it will be 1.5 million rupees. In Sri Lanka average income of a middle class family is about 20000 Rs, if they had save 15000Rs per month it will get ten years to save 1.5 million RS. So you can imagine how importance is giving free university education in Sri Lanka.

For many children in poor and developing countries education is the only way out of poverty. My opinion is every nation must provide free primary, secondary and university education.

your thesis statement is kind of weak. I think you should specify some of those benefits on the first statement too.

I notice that you don't get to the specific question of public funding for university education until the third paragraph. Since that (rather than the importance of education in general) is the focus of the essay, you should get to it sooner. Throughout the essay, you ought to provide examples of the benefits of university education rather than education in general.

Thanks all for your kind replies...

Your essay does sort of answer the prompt, but your treatment of the topic seems a bit superficial. For instance, you mention that


You could easily talk about the economic benefits of providing education for all in its own paragraph. If university educated people earn more on average than non-university educated ones, and so pay more taxes when they start work, then can gov't subsidies in some sense be seen as a direct financial investment?

Likewise, you could easily talk about the civic value of gov't subsidized education in a paragraph of its own. Critical thinking is a vital skill for citizens of a democracy to possess, etc.

Finally, you should deal with the opposing view, which might center on the notion that, having ruined our primary and secondary public schools, the gov't ought not be allowed to get involved in running the universities, too, or people won't have anyplace to go to get truly educated.

You lacked thesis statement in your introduction. However,a serious problem here is that you did not pay attention to what the question ask for. Maybe the first thing you should do is understanding the question fully.

In my opinion, you should figure out the scope of this essay first so that you can focus on. Here, I think, is the government's subsidy and university education.In your essay, you wrote more about education in general.

The introduction and conclusion are really important too. So, you should spend more time for it. In other words, 3 sentences for each is good enough.

These are my experience in my time of preparation for ielts test. I hope it helpful to you!

I usually begin with a general descripton that I am not too happy to do. It seems like it would be like everyone else's introduction. I try to avoid it but I can not think of any other way to start with instead of stating whether I agree with the statement or not.

I'm not familir with IELTS style of writing but from my perspective it seems to me that your essay relies too much on examples rather than stating ideas and facts. For example, you could explain several benefits that country can get from implementing free education system rather than mentioning specific figures like how much it cost for student to complete uni and amount of money government spent on education. I'm also a beginner in writing essay so don't take my advice too seriously :)

Specific details are usually a good idea. In this particular essay, though, the statistics for Sri Lanka really need to be compared to a country that doesn't provide free public education. Preferably, the country would be fairly similar to Sri Lanka in terms of population, GDP, etc. The statistics only show that free public education is a good thing if they comparable favorably with the alternatives.