Making college ‘free’ will only make it worse

Parents Forum
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I agree that private entities often overstate benefits and understate costs. Big difference though is its typically a lot easier for the general population to opt out of private cost/benefit mistakes than it is when government makes that mistake.

I don’t think the reason for the bad track record is because people don’t complain about the successes. I think its because there is a bad track record (for the reasons you note). The new highway that eased congestion likely opened a year or more late and 10-20% over budget.

I agree that the system you have proposed here is more likely to work than the “as we have it now, but free” approach. Maybe I have missed it but I do not recall seeing anyone proposing ending the building boom on-going on public college campuses across the country, selling off dorms, moving students to apartments 5 miles off campus and busing them to campus, etc. Without those changes (as I believe you agree), costs of college will continue to spiral upward with 100% publicly funded college.

What systematic changes do you think are needed to preserve the value in a college degree? How much overlap is there in terms of changes needed to control the costs of college?

If by “everyone” in Everyone has pension issues you mean all states, that isn’t true to the same degree. If you mean private entities as well as state governments, that isn’t really true at all. 401(k)s are much more popular now in the private sector. But no matter who has or doesn’t have pension issues, states like Illinois will have more issues paying for its portion of 100% publicly funded college because of unfunded pension liabilities than will a state with better funded public pensions.

I agree that few people want to talk about the unpleasant details of paying for a free college system. Not unique to college. Some of it is because there is a lack of understanding of the underlying issues. Lots of unintended consequences. Two, a lot of people would rather ignore the issues.

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But would such a course actually use a TA? Junior, senior, and graduate level math courses are commonly offered in “LAC format” (i.e. with only a relatively small lecture/discussion by a faculty member), even at big universities. So the theoretical use of a TA in an uncommon advanced math elective course is very unlikely to happen in real life.

Yes, this does mean that higher level courses are typically more expensive to teach, since they are (a) smaller, and (b) require instructors with more specialized knowledge. While any math PhD student can be a TA for a frosh-level single variable calculus course (or even be the primary instructor for such a course), many of the more advanced courses typically require matching faculty instructors within the specialty associated with them. Something as uncommon as model theory may only exist as a graduate level course within a math department which actually has a faculty member interested in it. Note that the lower cost and readily available instructors for lower level courses underpins the idea of starting college at a low cost community college and then only going to the university to finish one’s degree with the higher level courses.

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There’s a misunderstanding by some posters here that making public higher education “free” means everyone gets it, the way everyone can use “free” public roads.

Even now, FA at public colleges only goes to students who have the qualifications to be admitted into the school.

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Well universities are necessarily tied to the government (otherwise there would be no quality control), and both the government and private entities are guilty of unwarranted optimism.

People don’t complain when the public school system is perfectly functional. People don’t complain when the street sweeper makes sure the streets are clean. People don’t complain when the police or firefighters arrive quickly enough to properly take care of emergencies. And so on. Complaining only happens when things don’t work as well.

And a year late and 20% over budget is pretty solid. I’ve found that anyone who does large-scale projects like that either gets paid an obscene amount of money to be sure that it’s done on time and with high quality (e.g. for extremely time-critical projects), or they will have a few cost overruns and be a bit late. A year and 20% is nothing for something on the scale of a freeway. I wish that were the norm for being late.

That one would certainly take some public convincing, to be sure.

Alright, so obviously there’s a problem with college being expensive in that it’s out of reach for the poor or for people that really can’t manage to scrounge up the money you need to attend. That’s problem one. Problem two is how many people basically have to schedule their entire lives around debt payments for a decade after graduation. Those two are the problems related with college costs.

Problem three has to do with where college graduates go after they finish school. As I’ve mentioned many times, requirement creep is a genuine problem and too many people are forced to have degrees that the job itself doesn’t really require because the company decides that a degree is suddenly a requirement. It often leads to a ridiculous scenario where it’s much harder to get a job than it is to excel at the job itself.

Tying into this problem is the problem of too many people at the top of the education pool. For example, this article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for-more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story.html

A PhD or other equivalent degree is a sizeable chunk of your life invested into education. If you cannot guarantee at least a moderately good outcome upon graduation for students, you’re going to lose a lot of talented people who just won’t bother with it. That may have a lot to do with how high the PhD dropout rate is.

The AMA limits production in such a way that MDs are essentially guaranteed a job in their field after they graduate that will pay the debt off easily enough. I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable for universities to guarantee job placement at at least reasonably respectable places for all of its graduates, and to adjust quality and size of classes to make that feasible.

Basically, to keep up the quality of the degree: reduce the number of people who don’t need a degree who get one anyways, and guarantee job outcomes for people who are dedicating far more time than most to their education.

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A century ago Germany had the finest universities in the world. Now their universities are free and not very distinguished. An earlier poster asked “what do Norway, Finland, Greece, Argentina, Sweden, and Denmark all have in common? Free universities.” What they also have in common is that all of them put together do not have a single so-called World Top 40 university. Their very best students come to the US to study. “Free university” is a bit like “free healthcare”: usually not very good.

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BLM is NOT the topic of this thread. Posts deleted.

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I actually think this thread is political by nature and should probably be closed. Free college is a hypothetical promise being made by politicians who are not yet elected. The idea is now apparently being endorsed publicly by a group we can’t reference. Many pros & cons have been intelligently flushed out, but no decisions will be made based on anything we have said here. Interesting debate though.

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In any case I feel that the discussion has more or less run its course. At this point I could probably just link old posts and have about the same effect as if I wrote new replies. That being so, I’d say that all of the major angles of the idea of free college have been considered and at this point it’s a matter of reading and evaluating the argument on your own.

After a while the discussion just starts going in circles and I don’t think too many people really want to start that again.

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@NeoDymium You really put a lot of thought into the ideas on here. Very impressive! Thank you for raising a lot of issues that I personally would not have considered otherwise.

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College being free will just mean that tax payers are wasting their money for a percentage of low achieving students to fail classes and drop out of school.

Not everyone who starts college graduates. And free college would have to be funded with our tax money.

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Someone mentioned the “free” libraries or “free” K-12 education.

First, as most realize, they are not “free” - they may generally be free (no tuition/basic user fee) to the user, but someone through mainly property, sales, and income taxes pay those costs (and lottery!). The reason for K-12 is a belief that a minimum level of education is necessary for the country to function both from “informed” citizens and minimally functional adults who won’t need the state to care for them (although we’re increasingly in the US moving to a society where people demand outcomes, not just freedom to pursue opportunities).

Economists call that positive externalities and economic theory posits society should collectively pick up the tab because individual “consumers” won’t collectively buy the optimal quantity (whether that’s 12 years of school is another story).

Higher education is not required (oh yes, we’ve dumbed down jobs that don’t require a college degree to have one). Sure, some occupations need post-secondary education and training - that’s why they pay more and people “invest” their own resources (savings or borrowing) because it might produce a good return on that investment.

If you look at collegeboard stats, gross tuition is of course way up, but net tuition (primarily due to discounting, etc.) is down or flat. That’s on AVERAGE so for any SINGLE person, especially if you’re in that strata where the government thinks you’re ‘rich’’ (yeah, but you know you’re living paycheck to paycheck) and your kid is okay but not elite school material (with their huge endowments and huge financial aid for the top 1%), you are probably squeezed more.

But look at Bernie’s plan - yeah the “really rich” would pay (of course, they are also the ones most able to get around the tax code), but so would the middle class…so your kid could pay a few thousand less to attend CC or local public…and t hink about its logical end – let’s say the 20-30% who don’t go to college go to CC/public, those schools costs go up (facilities, etc.) so more taxes are needed.

it’s a nice sound bite for sure…but if it’s about fixing income inequality, start at the HS and get rid of the everyone must do the “college ready” curriculum and let kids have flexible tailored pathways for what they define as success…plumbers, mechanics, electricians…make way more per hour than a lot of recent college grads…

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@LostHobo143 @BizWhiz In total agreement with you. Several of us on this thread have tried hard to point out your thoughts.

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I am not a fan of free tuition for all, but not for the normal reasons. Our country COULD pay for it if we change some of our priorities, and as far as I’m concerned, Education deserves to be right up there at the top, but when considering paying for college for all, the return is too little for the investment. The reason is simple – we already have fairly inexpensive paths to a college education…Community college, part-time attendance while working, cheaper schools (there are a LOT of 4-year colleges still in this country that are not outrageously expensive). Community colleges have a woeful graduation rate (when sending them on to a 4-year school). Free college would just dip deeper into the bucket to find even worse students. Not everyone has the tools necessary to go to college, and not everyone should. If we are going to spend more money on Education (and we should) it should be at the secondary level.

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I finally saw an article with the smaller private college presidents speaking up about this ‘plan’. Most think it would destroy the smaller, less well endowed, private colleges who compete for students of the middle class, students who would need to take the free offer. They talked about the private colleges becoming less diverse and elitist as only the wealthy would have the choice of where to go and take their federal dollars.

If the figures they are giving out are correct, that 80% of students could go to their state colleges for free, would the states be able to handle that number of additional students? Will everyone take the ‘free’ safety instates school over the $20k tuition OOS?

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I made the brief suggestion that maybe the government could offer reputable private schools the equivalent of the average cost of tuition at public schools, as an incentive to keep them alive. It’s a compromise and I’m not sure it’s the right way, but the long and short of it is that there are ways to make it work if those schools are truly worth keeping around.

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The current proposals would only mean that states would put in LESS money to their state institutions since the federal governement would be paying.

The $125,000 cutoff would be resented in states where that income doesn’t go as far as other states. (Although this is true for a lot of arbitrary cut-offs in other programs).

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More high quality things are available for a higher cost. But spending more money on something doesn’t mean that it’s higher quality.

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The way the proposal is now is that the state would pay half of the tuition, not of the costs that the states pay (budget amounts, grants, benefits for state employees) and the feds would pay the other half. If instate tuition is $10,000, the state would pay half and the feds half. Currently, the states may pay none of that tuition at all, the student from the family with a $100k AGI may get no state aid and no federal aid, and pay all $10k of that tuition.

A low tuition state like FL is not going to get as much match from the government as a high tuition state like UVM.

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This thread’s discussion has been philosophical, not political. The focus had been on the funding mechanics of higher education, which is relevant to a website dedicated to college admissions & college affordability.

“Free” college (i.e. fully publicly funded) is not hypothetical. It exists and works in many countries.

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Very true, but it is important to also examine what are the results for the people receiving “free college.”

Well, it turns out that in the countries with “free college” for all the standard of living for someone who went to college and got a college degree is actually lower than an American who did not go to to college, but who do these five things below (applies to both males and females):

  1. Graduate high school
  2. Get a job, any job, after high school and then continually apply for better jobs as skills are acquired
  3. Do not have kids before getting married
  4. Get married
  5. Stay married at least 10 years - this creates incentive to stay married and protects the accumulation of assets)

American students who do the above are solidly in the middle class. Also, these Americans have higher home ownership rates, greater personal assets accumulated, more and better cars, larger homes, and more kids.

Therefore, “free college” is fine and dandy, but just understand that the results seen in countries that provide free college comes at an expense, i.e., lower wages, higher taxes, and a lower standard of living, which all leads to less choice. And fewer choices, by definition, means less freedom.

Hm… I rather have more choice and freedom than be a cookie cutter citizen and forced to live like my neighbor. In such a case, who cares if we all have college degrees? I don’t that is for sure.