Take a look at this FREE college which has been around since the 1800s. It is called Williamson college in PA and while it is vocational in nature there is no reason this can’t be done with academic colleges with big endowments. https://www.williamson.edu/.
Making it free isn’t the answer but we should all work together to make it affordable again. When an uncle of mine went to Cal Poly SLO 30 years ago, the full time tuition was only like $250 a quarter, now it’s like $3,000 a quarter. Public universities should have a $1,500 a semester/quarter tuition max and out of state tuition should not be more than $2,500 a semester/quarter and everyone should automatically get in state tuition after one year of living in the state. Let’s also not push as many people to go to college as a lot of people would be better off learning a trade instead. Let’s stop running schools like businesses.
@dodgers3222 You can’t keep professor & staff salaries the same every year. Like yours, their living expenses go up periodically as food, rent, utilities, and other prices in society rise. So, how do you keep tuition constant without raising taxes on CA residents and businesses to offset the increasing unversity operating costs each year?
If more people in CA actually paid taxes and full tuition, then maybe the CA universities would have more operating money and could keep tuition at a steady rate. But, now, CA is buried under the financial burden of providing free services to a large, poor immigrant population, many of whom get paid in cash if they work, and they don’t pay taxes. On the other hand, I know businesses and individuals that have left CA because their taxes were too high.
I love CA and am a taxpayer there, but I feel like its generosity has made it a much poorer state, and the public schools are suffering. Someone has to fund the costs to operate the schools. OOS students and full-pay CA students are paying for the rest with increased tuition each year.
California also has lots of high paid immigrants and native born people paying income taxes. Of course, everyone who buys things pays sales tax, so the claim that “poor people do not pay taxes” is false, unless they are in prison. Unfortunately, poorly thought out “tough on crime” laws enacted during the crime wave that peaked in the early 1990s put lots of people in prison inefficiently (i.e. in terms of amount of prison space used relative to the number and severity of crimes prevented), so prison spending has been one of the big budget busters.
California has also been a net giver in terms of taxes paid to the national government relative to national government spending.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/federal-taxes-paid-vs-federal-spending-received-state-1981-2005
I think that, when you make things free, people just take them for granted and don’t value them. For example, look at the public school system in the US. In my school, half of the students don’t try in the slightest to learn. I believe that the studious students should attend college, then the rest go into the workforce to do jobs and boost the economy. Also, the government should do less for students, as their student loan programs encourage people to take on unsurmountable debt, leading colleges to continuously make tuition more expensive. That money should be used for better purposes.
As if there is a lack of slackers in private schools and in universities under the current system…
If we’re going to make college free, we’ll probably have to greatly increase the academic standards to prevent over-saturation.
@1Wife1Kid, “I wonder how much worse off USA is because free K-12 education, free public roads, and such.” Well considering none of those things are actually “free”, since we pay for those things with property taxes, income taxes, etc. your point is moot.
Free tuition doesn’t mean free admit. One can’t compare free tuitoon to public school system. To get free college education, kids will have to first get admitted.
aren’t the majority of US colleges open admission?
Yes, and that is the main problem.
If college becomes free, students who are not college material will find a college that will admit them because the college will be paid by the government. It is in the college’s interest to not fail them. Talk about perverse incentives.
One “free college” idea I would support is a modified version of the Texas admission plan. My thoughts are that you can go to college for free if you are:
A) In the top 10% locally (by school, town, county, etc.), OR
B) In the top 10% nationally.
The point of A is to make it politically palatable by ensuring that every demographic group can be represented, including inner city school systems with lower performance. The point of B is to ensure that high performing school systems don’t get penalized.
If the students behave like rational actors, free tuition shouldn’t prevent them from taking their studies seriously; they’re still spending “money” in the form of forfeited income.
People are not rational. Two simple examples: Many people, including college students, carry revolving credit and buy lottery tickets.
National percentiles would probably need to be determined by test score for consistency.
There’s also some kinks to work out in terms of which public colleges are allowed to use holistic admissions (I don’t think Berkeley or Michigan would be happy with auto admit).
With my approach, I was separating the getting the “free tuition” from admission to any specific college. Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, etc. can still determine which students to accept, including those that did not get free tuition.
I like it. Simple but effective.
When people have less skin in the game, that does tend to skew behaviors.
Good thought @Hebegebe but how do you measure class rank? Texas defaults to the local school (which can work at the state level), but nationally? There is already a lot of blowback on any standardized testing and doubtful you could get a national benchmark on Top 10% (in fact, more schools are moving away from specific class rankings).
You first have to realize many states are in financial difficulties - just google state pension crises - and until you solve the pension and other post-employment benefits (OPEB) issues most states (and localities) have, more federal money will simply mean displacing (not supplementing) state dollars. Second, the free tuition ideas generally start with community colleges so yeah, those are both open admission and low graduation rates.
In fact, can you see a scenario where this idea is also not tied to outcomes (hey, we’re going to spend billions on free tuition but not also expect graduation rates to increase?).
If you look at other countries where college is “free”, you tend to see about the same (low to high 40%s) level of college graduates - because in those countries vocational/trade career tracks are pushed early and the admissions bar is set higher. Also, they don’t offer the same “co-curriculars” (ie sports, etc.) anywhere to the extent you see in the US (hence the per pupil is lower). Finally, those economies tax their citizens much more so in essence the “middle” class subsidizes much more than here those that go to college.
I have not read anything that a national ranking or qualification would play any part. State schools would be tuition free for state residents, but if you live in Texas, why would it matter what Utah is doing or that Vermont includes art and music in the gpa? You don’t get to go to Utah or Vermont schools for free. The students would still have to be accepted to Mich or Texas or Cal so those schools don’t have to change their admission standards either. The competition might be increased if more high school seniors think they’d like to save money by staying instate, but there would still be the same number of students accepted at the top school. Those who might have been accepted to the top instate school but now aren’t because of the increased popularity of staying instate will be bumped to the next level, and some from that level might be bumped to the next lower level, until there is no more room for instate students at the community college level. I don’t see anyone being shut out. Currently some of the community colleges are free or very low cost, and you don’t see a lot of students shut out of those.
Of course if this happened there would be more room at OOS or private schools, so maybe some who weren’t accepted at those schools now would be, and that would free up some of the flagship spots. It’s just a shuffling of where students attend and who pays for it. There should still be the same number of students.
Economics 101: lower price leads to higher demand. When in-state tuition drops to zero, we are going to see more college graduates. Is it really a good thing? I do not know.
"The New York Fed, in a blog post authored by researchers Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz, examined the plight of those who graduated between 2009 and 2013. The study found that some 45% of college grads worked in a “non-college job,” which is defined as a position in which fewer than 50% of the workers in that job need a bachelor’s degree.
The low-skilled jobs — including baristas, bartenders, and cashiers — accounted for 19.3% of underemployed recent college graduates, paying $23,584 on average."
Will zero in-state tuition entice many (arguably academically weaker) HS students who would initially go directly into (say blue-collar) labor market eventually get a college degree and then become underemployed in the white-collar job market and unhappy about “4 years of waste of their life?”
This possible distortion is likely deflate the pay for those less-desirable white-collar jobs and inflate the pay for blue-collar jobs performed by high school graduates. If so, you bet there would be a lot of unhappiness.
Actually, the over-supply problems of college graduates (relative to high school graduates) are very troublesome social issues in China, Taiwan, and some other Asian countries. In those countries, a janitor often makes more money than a college graduate.