The most expensive student is the one we did not invest in

Because the student who leaves university due to money does not just disappear from the registration list. With them may disappear a doctor who would have treated thousands of patients, an engineer who would have built a company, a teacher who would have influenced hundreds of children, or a researcher who would have found the answer to a question we have not yet asked.

We are skilled at calculating the cost of education. But we are less skilled at calculating the cost of its absence.

And this is perhaps one of the biggest problems with the way we view higher education.

When the state spends on a road, we call it infrastructure. When it funds an electricity grid, we call it an investment. And when it secures a stockpile of wheat or medicine, we call it strategic security.

But when it spends on a student, the word "cost" quickly appears.

Why?

For a road does not design itself, a hospital does not treat anyone alone, a laboratory does not innovate, and a machine, no matter how precise, does not know why it was built.

Behind all of that is an educated human being.

That is why perhaps it is time to add another concept to the dictionary of national security: educational security.

Educational security is not the number of universities, nor the number of seats, nor the number of degrees we print each year. It is the ability of society to ensure that no talent is lost due to its family's income, and that no student begins a path their mind can complete only to be stopped by their wallet halfway through.

It is simply that the distance a person travels in education should be linked to what they can learn, not what they can pay.

And this is not an emotional argument against economic calculations. It is an economic calculation of a smarter kind.

A student is not a consumer of public money; they are capital under construction.

Every amount invested in them moves through a long chain: money becomes education, education becomes skill, skill becomes production, and production becomes income, taxes, companies, innovation, and jobs.

But the problem is that this journey takes time.

Politics loves results that can be displayed at the end of the year. Education, however, asks the decision-maker to invest today in a result that history might attribute to someone else twenty years from now.

And here, the meaning of leadership is tested.

Medical equipment can be bought within months. But you cannot buy the doctor who knows how to use it after a crisis occurs. You can import technology, but you cannot import an entire society capable of developing it overnight.

Minds need years before we need them.

Therefore, education is not a sector competing with health, the economy, and technology for funding. It is the sector that will create the people who will manage health, the economy, and technology.

And here, university tuition becomes an issue bigger than a bill.

When a young person reaches university after years of education, then stops because their family could not afford the cost, we are leaving a long-term investment incomplete at its most sensitive stage.

But the solution is not to write the word "free" over university doors and walk away.

For cheap education that adds no knowledge may be very costly to society, and a degree that does not grant its holder real capability is not an investment, but a postponement of the unemployment problem.

Educational security needs more than a seat: access, continuity, quality, and then opportunity.

For a student to enter university, to be able to stay there, to actually learn, and then to find an economy that knows what to do with what they have learned.

Otherwise, we fall into another paradox: we pay to educate our best minds, then watch them leave in search of a place that values them.

We worry a lot when capital leaves the country.

But there is capital that does not leave through banks.

It leaves on an airplane seat, with a degree in its suitcase.

And in the century where knowledge has become one of the most important tools of economic power, the state that loses its minds does not just lose citizens; it is funding, unintentionally, the future of other economies.

That is why the question must change.

Not: Can we afford the cost of investing in education?

But: Can we afford the cost of not investing in it?

For the state that secures wheat for ten years is thinking about potential hunger. The one that secures energy is thinking about a potential outage. And the one that invests in education is thinking about a greater danger: that the future arrives, and it finds no one who knows how to manage it.

And when we look this way at the student whose family is waiting for the tuition payment deadline, the whole picture changes.

They are not a university number.

They are not a burden on the budget.

And they are not a beneficiary of subsidies.

They are a possibility.

A possibility of a company not yet founded, a cure not yet discovered, a school not yet changed, and an idea not yet born.

And smart societies do not wait until possibilities turn into losses to know their value.

For the most expensive student to the state is not the student it paid a lot to educate; it is the student who could have done a lot for it, then lost them because it decided that investing in them was too costly.