Financing Higher Education: the students or the taxpayer?

Wouldn't it be more equitable and more efficient that the students share the cost of financing their own higher education? The introduction of significant tuition fees in higher education is often presented as an obvious reform. According to recurring arguments, the State is too poor to fund adequately higher education; tax-funding is anti-redistributive since the average taxpayer is poorer than the average higher education graduate; tuition fees are useful to improve the overall matching of students to school. However, after analysis and taken separately, none of these arguments appears convincing: public funding is not necessarily a poor funding; vertical equity is better pursued with progressive income taxation; selection is a better matching instrument than tuition fees in the presence of asymmetric information and credit aversion. Beyond vertical equity and efficiency, the issue of higher education financing remains primarily a distributive issue between those who attended higher education and those who did not. It is an issue of horizontal equity, which depends on one preferred vision of distributive justice, the role of higher education and the justification of progressive taxation.