I think the OP’s hypothetical was that a group of billionaires would fund the entire thing. But as the saying goes ‘eventually you run out of other people’s money’.
^ I know. It would be nice… not going to happen though.
The taxpayers would be forced to carry the burden and quality would drop. Those are the two main cons.
I think we need more good jobs so that graduates can afford to make their loan payments. Let’s figure that out first and then chip away at the loan-driven college cost increases.
Interesting discussion so far…for purposes of the thought experiment, assume an effectively unlimited supply of money, ad infinitum paid for exclusively by private donors who attach zero strings. I know it is not possible, but the idea is to imagine the possibilities both pro and con.
It was possible. What you describe is called Cooper Union but tuition-free education did not survive last financial crisis so they started charging tuition last year. I think it was a relatively no frills education and graduates were happy. Acceptance rate was very low. All pros and almost no cons (unless you need a campus, football, art museum, lazy rivers ,etc.). It offers limited number of majors in Engineering, Art and Architecture. Not sure how much research their professors conduct. Very much similar to the free state sponsored college abroad that I graduated from.
OP, how do you see it being set up? Children would be “tracked” early on as to who would earn the free college education? Or, as it is now…meet certain academic marks near the end of the first 12 years for admission?
An interesting discussion and one that has merit far beyond its initial idea, of totally free college tuition.
As far as the person who sneered about public k-12 education and how bad it is, let me give you the other side, besides the fact that many public schools are turning out well educated kids, look at what happens when you don’t have a good, free education system, look at the deep south, where there was a reluctance to pay for good public education (and before the civil war, when it simply didn’t exist in many places, or what was there was lame) and the impact that continues to have to this day; think about what people are complaining about, the flood of immigrants from Central and South America and Mexico, most of whom have had little to no schooling, because the education system in those countries is geared towards the well off, and you see the other side.
It is interesting that someone mention CUNY, especially CCNY, the flagship school. It is still pretty cheap tuition (last I checked it was around 3k a year), but in my mom’s day, it used to be known as the poor man’s Harvard, and I believe it still has the most number of nobel prize winners among any college around. It was selective, but it was nowhere near the level for example of Ivies today, it wasn’t quite that crazy (If I remember what my mom said, who went there in the early 40’s, it was like certain regents scores and classes, and a GPA I think in the B to B+ range). Open admissions also proved to be a disaster and is a cautionary tale, when they did that it trashed the CUNY system, and in some ways it is only starting to recover now.
What the CUNY ‘experiment’ tells us is that free doesn’t and shouldn’t mean open the doors to anyone, or even that college is the be all and end all. If I was going to rephrase the question, rather than making all college free, I would say make all post high school training free, whether it was traditional college or advanced vocational/tech training, I think that would be more valuable. If someone wanted to go to college, but didn’t have the academic background, then you have a rigorous remedial program outside the colleges, not community college (which the best ones are great,a lot of them exist as some sort of diploma mill IME), and if someone can get through that, then on to college. the CUNY experiment failed with open admissions (whose goal had its heart in the right place, trying to get disadvantaged kids, especially minorities, into college) because so many of the kids had come out of public schools that were horrible, passed through and weren’t ready, and the political pressure was to dumb down college and turn it into another rubber stamp, so you had kids coming out of the CUNY program who could barely write and read (CCNY tried what another poster mentioned, they basically said anyone could go, but started failing kids out who couldn’t do the work, and that created a firestorm, claims of racism and so forth, since many of the kids who failed out were black and hispanic kids who had gone through crap schools).
And interestingly there is model of this, and it worked. Many of the same people who would say that providing free education is a boondoggle, it won’t work, said the same thing about a program that might be a model, they fought it at the time…and I am talking the GI Bill. After WWII millions of people who served took advantage of the GI bill and went to college (a large majority were the first to go to college in their family), or went into trade school programs for plumbing and electrical work and other skilled trades, and it created the modern middle class, the economic benefits of that program were huge. The key to the program is not focusing on one thing, and it also takes the impetus off of college as a trade school. In IT, for example, you don’t need a computer science or engineering degree to do programming professionally, a lot of programmers studied other things in college then took skills training, and it is quite possible to do IT work simply with a rigorous training program. There are high tech jobs that these days are using college grads, who got degrees simply because it was a hashmark, where a good training program like that which an electrician went through might suffice. The fatal flaw of the OP’s hypothesis is assuming college is the answer, when the real answer is advanced training, and quite frankly, college is not for everyone, and the kind of teaching they do shouldn’t be trade based, as many people want it to be. A program that targets students to their inclinations and desires is a lot better than what we have today, where there are a ton of colleges, especially more than a few of the online ones, that are nothing but diploma mills giving out a hashmark in exchange for tuition. One of the brightest people I ever met was a friend of my dad’s, a fellow WWII veteran (crazy guy, served on subs in the South Pacific), who wasn’t the college type. He got training in HVAC, and spent a good portion of his career as the head of HVAC for the Museum of Modern art in NYC.
@VaBluebird - I have deliberately refrained from adding constraints as much as possible. That is part of the experiment. You tell me, how would you do it? The idea is to discuss pros and cons. It is also to see how people perceive such a system working. Just looking to see some creative thought. Part II would be more focused, perhaps, on delving into solutions for cons. (or maybe that happens organically as other posters respond)
@musicprnt - I have not laid out a hypothesis, this is merely a thought experiment. I was perhaps not specific enough. My intent was that by ‘college’ I meant any post HS education, provided it comes from a public, rather than private, institution of learning. Ultimately, I would lay the onus back on you and other posters…how do you see it working? You certainly point out some interesting points.
Public universities are free of cost in Brazil. They are also considered, by and large, higher quality than private universities. To be admitted, you have to pass a rigorous test related to your targeted major called the vestibular. Your performance dictates which schools will accept you. Young people from the upper middle class and above take specialized courses, often lasting a year after HS, to do well on this exam. The stakes are very high.
Conversely, public K-12 schools in Brazil are largely inferior. The effect is that wealthy kids with good access to private K-12 education and a vestibular course then have an advantage in admission to the best universities in the land, tuition free. If you’re a mediocre student, your parents pay tuition for you to go to a private university. So free public universities do not have a social leveling effect. To counteract that result, Brazil introduced quota systems/affirmative action to ensure that poorer, non-whites have access to public universities. That has helped, but implementation has been uneven and controversial, given that racial identity is much more malleable there than here.
I am not saying that we should adopt the Brazilian system. I’m just relating how free public universities have played out in one instance.
So the scenario we’re hypothesising is that, somehow, all education is free in the US, but no one has to pay for it? It just is free? And the money that’s used to pay for all the costs for the college just comes out of thin air?
Well, then I predict a boost to inflation, as money used for college is now spent elsewhere, though production hasn’t increased any. The best number I can find for amount spent on postsecondary education is 500B. So, with GDP of 17T, we should expect 3% more inflation every year than we would otherwise. Due to the income effect we might see stronger GDP growth as well, but I don’t know how to estimate how much. The biggest effect I think will be higher inflation, which makes sense, as this hypothetical is isomorphic so “The government prints extra money earmarked specifically for providing postsecondary education for free in the amount of total college expenditures annually.”
OK. So I like a lot of the things I am hearing. Very thoughtful. Here is my take:
The United States fairly unique in terms of its laws and its cultural history. These attributes have many good points, but can also lead to a conflicts when trying to do something that seemingly works elsewhere.
Free education comes at a price. As some have pointed out, nothing is free. The cost is simply spread across all individuals rather than those who are actually using the service. This has its own inflationary effect as spenders tend to spend more when it is not ‘their’ money. In my hypothetical, however, an unknown contributor has accounted for any and all costs. Even then, we have a price to pay.
One of two primary scenarios are likely given free education at all public schools. Either the supply expands to meet the higher demand or the demand is artificially restricted to meet the limited supply. Let’s examine those two separately:
Expanded supply means, to me, that more and more professors will be needed to teach and costs will rise for schools to expand facilities (or for new schools to be built). That cost would be absorbed by our benefactors. So they supply could expand at zero direct cost (in this scenario) but what of the education? An expansion of the pool of professors will have a depressing effect on the average talent of those teaching classes. You could try to increase wages to improve talent searches, but most often you will find that if wages for instructors get high enough, you stop getting good teaching talent and start getting people looking simply for the dollars. It is a conundrum we face with HS teacher wages today. So the overall ability to teach goes down. The other major effect on the supply side is that the value of a degree will go down. When a HS diploma was rare, it was more valuable in the marketplace. As the percentage of potential workers with HS diplomas went up, the expectation that all (most) workers would have a diploma went up and the value was significantly diminished. The same is likely to happen to a public college degree in the future if ‘everyone’ could get a degree. There would also be further pressure to lessen the difficulty of getting in as a college degree would become a de facto price of admission to getting a ‘real’ job. This would further devalue the degree itself. There would also be pressure to invoke the equal protection clause for specific public schools schools. Why is it fair that student A gets to go to Michigan while student B can only go to Eastern Michigan (no offense)? Since the ‘free’ education is now effectively a public utility, the colleges will not be permitted to use things like talent to differentiate. I can see college admissions be either by lottery or strictly by geography (much like HS today).
Restricted demand has its own issues. Primarily the aforementioned legal history and the equal protection clause would likely strike down any attempt to restrict admissions to specific talent levels. This is especially true since there is no one ‘best’ way to determine levels of talent. I can foresee rampant cheating and manipulation of the system to ensure that the limited spots are filled with student C. Given variables in opportunity, this type of system would tend to unfairly restrict admissions to those from better educated families and as a result, skew toward the wealthy (as education tends to lead toward more wealth). In effect, the smart get smarter (and therefore richer). This would essentially push any attempt to restrict demand back into an expanded supply scenario.
The other consequence of a system like this is that private universities would boom for those who can pay. A degree from a school that is unencumbered by the influx of students and can be more selective in hiring staff and admitting students would produce a product (educated students/degrees) that are more valuable in the marketplace. Costs would go up as the value of these degrees would rise. Some colleges would choose to attempt to engineer society and there would likely be a fairly diverse group that accomplish this degree type. Others would go for the cash and tend to admit whomever could pay. This would also have the net effect of further devaluing the ‘public degree’.
We would end up with a similar stratification that we see today. It would just take 4-6 years longer and cost the economy more money. The money our benefactors spend on ‘free’ education could otherwise be used to increase productivity and thus grow the economy. The concept of a free degree would have the opposite effect. More money would be spent to essentially arrive at the same equilibrium that we have today. 90% of people would have a BS/BA and if you want a technical or managerial job, you would need one from an elite private school or an MS/MA instead.
There is much more than can be said, but this is already pretty long…thoughts?
@musicprnt I like that having both trade schools and universities. Isn’t that what they do in Germany? The difference would be in Germany many don’t go to universities.
For the European and other countries where higher education is free, does that include only tuition, fees, and books? Or, does it also include room and board? In the US, the COA estimates universities are required to provide additionally list amounts for personal expenses and transportation; I would guess those would not be covered even where higher education is free.
Where university is ‘free’, only the very top students go. I met a German girl going to a private high school in the US to boost her GPA. She said the German equivalent of high school was just too difficult for her.
The thing I worry about with colleges becoming free is the erosion of quality. Not the educational quality, but the quality of the overall package/college experience. Schools in Europe, for example, are run lean, [with far fewer frills and support services than schools in the US](European Universities vs. American Universities: We Win). You’ll get a good education and a place to live (maybe), but that’s about it.
Personally, I like the college system in the US the way it is. I like the all-inclusive, self-contained nature of college campuses here. Could affordability be better? Sure, but making college free (paid for by government) comes with it’s drawbacks. I don’t think the colleges would just magically become free, and everything just stay the same.
I know the Service Academies extract several years of obligation in exchange for an education, but I don’t think that hurts their reputation.
So it can be done.
On a large scale, it destabilizes the private schools somewhat, but only if capacity is not capped. And that’s just where it starts to get weird and maybe not workable.
It might be better for an individual state to offer loans to any student, the principle of which is decreased by the income tax that student pays after graduation – as soon as they leave the state, they’d become liable for the entire debt. Students who graduate and stay, whether they started out as in-state or not, help build that state’s economy. And although their state income tax goes toward paying down principle, the sales tax, the real estate tax, local income tax, etc. do not - they still would be a net gain to the state, I think.
My brother is a USAFA graduate. Admission to the service academies is in some ways more difficult than getting into Ivy league schools. That is not to say the scores are higher, but that the overall student shows more fitness and leadership qualities than the average academic-only recruit. Not to mention you also have to get an appointment from Congress (or the President). The class size is similar (around 1000 students). The academies are considered highly selective. The schools are able to maintain their reputation because they are not restricted in the same way that the typical public school would be restricted by law. An area many do not consider is that SCOTUS has held in a number of situations that the military (academies included) is not subject to all of the rules other institutions may be held. The defense of the country is deemed to be more important than social experiments or someone’s feelings. Any of those types of issues are handled at the direction of the President. So, unless the President ordered the service academies to take students randomly or in some other ‘fair’ distribution, they could remain as selective as the President allows them to be.
If the government insists on being involved in higher education at all, I would prefer a system not unlike the one you suggest. We can discuss taxes on another thread, but I will note that some very successful states do not have an income tax. I think the concept of some sort of ROI for the state if they are giving money make sense. Similarly, I think anyone getting Federal money in excess of one year’s average annual salary, should be required to render service in kind (similar to military, but maybe working in government offices). Heck, maybe you see art students painting murals in some government-owned properties. I would love to see the mass of bureaucrats in Washington replaced by what amounts to temps, but that is another thread entirely as well.
The risk of the government service option is that it gets twisted by agendas. The military (enlistment specifically) was once seen as a way out of poverty for many people of many backgrounds. Often today, that same opportunity is used as a hammer against the service because there are too many minorities serving. There may be a similar backlash if government service were required as some would view it as servitude for the poor. It may hurt sensibilities and we cannot have that.
I do, too. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. There can be multiple tiers, free trade schools and community colleges, low cost state universities. To maintain democracy, we need a larger middle class. We either stop shipping middle class jobs overseas or we educate general public to earn upper class jobs creating a new better paid middle class.
“we educate general public to earn upper class jobs”
This only works if there is a need for ‘upper class’ jobs. Let’s use Doctor and Lawyer for example. If we tripled the number of educated Doctors and Lawyers without a similar increase in the demand for Doctors and Lawyers, we would simply drive down the wages for doctoring and lawyering. We would ‘increase’ the middle class by lowering more people into it rather than raising people into it.
Now, there could be other beneficial factors involved. Frankly, I think there is a glut of lawyers, but a dearth of doctors. The Medical profession does a good job of restricting the number of doctors that enter the workforce (thus maintaining the income and status). It is a bit of a double-edged sword. Do you really want less-qualified doctors for less money? As long as the quality of care could be maintained, I think I woudl be in favor of removing the artificial limits to med school students and increasing the numbers. There are other factors though. Do you really want to go through the difficulty and risk of being a doctor for less money.
The market drives equilibrium. Higher wages go to jobs where specialized abilities or skills are required. If anyone could do it, the value of the job would go down. It is not about the value to society. Athletes get high pay because what they do is unique. Not everyone can achieve at the highest levels of sport. Teachers are more valuable to society, but many more people can qualify to teach. To make matters worse, we do not have a comprehensive way to ensure that great teachers get paid more than poor ones or that teacher who are ineffective lose their jobs. In our own twisted logic, we give teachers tenure based on not getting themselves fired before then, not on how well they teach. These factors have a downward pressure on the teaching profession. [there are lots of other examples, these were just the easiest to come up with off of the top of my head. There are 1000s of awesome teachers and they deserve to get the high pay that befits the benefit they give society. The key is to make sure we pay the higher wages to the best teachers, not just a blanket pay to all teachers…yet another thread]
In many East Asian countries, the popular perception is also that the public government run universities are higher quality and more academically rigorous than their private counterparts.
With a few minute exceptions, there’s actually a stigma in such societies attached to private schools and students who attend them as inferior and “second rate” unless it’s one of the minute few exceptional elite private colleges such as Waseda and Keio* in Japan.
The stigma is similar to popular American perceptions against “for-profit” colleges as the common perception is if the students/their families are paying tuition, the private schools will have a strong profit motive of some kind to cater to their needs and retain them as students…including lowering academic standards.
In contrast, the prevailing cultural and historical factors have made it so the conventional wisdom over there is public colleges…especially the elite ones are free of the “weaknesses” of private colleges and thus, have little/no incentive to reduce admission/academic standards.
If anything, their popular reputation and public esteem depend on the public colleges enacting and maintaining extremely selective admission standards and the national college entrance exam perceived as a fair objective measure of academic merit for admission. With the possible exception of Mainland China(and even then only a,minute number of exceptions), there’s practically no alternative means of admission beyond taking the national college entrance exam and scoring at/above the minimum required score for a given college and department.
Also, the fact taxpayers are heavily subsidizing the free or more reasonable tuition…especially by US standards makes it so a critical majority of taxpayers feel the high admission standards and perceived objective admission criterion of the national college entrance exam minimizes the possibility their taxes are being “wasted” on students who don’t meet academic standards for admission and/or are unmotivated.
Then again, the admission process to gaining admission to East Asian colleges, especially elite public ones are so grueling and students deemed academically weaker taken off the academic college track as early as the end of 8th grade means that:
- The thought of offering remedial HS or sometimes even lower-level courses in college for academically underprepared students would not only be considered alien to them, but an absurdity.
The prevailing mentality is if one didn’t demonstrate proficiency in HS or moreso, K-8 level classes, they have no business being placed on the academic college track…much less applying and attended college. Any remedial instruction to bridge the gap for late-bloomers who later desire to attend college despite being taken off the college-track would be given at institutions separate from the colleges…or they/their families have enough money or they somehow manage to get scholarships or other sources of funding(i.e. individual sponsors), they also have the option of applying to US colleges with open admission or lower admission standards compared to the colleges in their respective home countries.
- The academic workload and culture once a student has passed the high bars of tracking and admission hurdles to the academic college track before college and college in some of these societies(especially Japan) tends to be much more relaxed than in US.
Many Japanese international grad students in particular found US undergrads with the exception of the obviously effective party/beer majors have a higher academic workload and put more hours into studying in college on average than they did at their respective elite colleges back in Japan even if they were shocked at the numbers of US undergrads even at elite Us lacking in proficiency in academic subjects which officially should have been mastered in K-12.
- And students with elite college aspirations who are able to score high enough on the national college entrance exam would almost always turn down admission to those two elite private Us if offered admission to higher ranked public universities like Kyoto U or especially UTokyo...the popularly perceived #1 college in the nation. Especially considering up until recently, many highly competitive public sector departments and private corporations structured their hiring so competitively that not graduating from higher ranked public Us or in some cases...only certain perceived prestigious departments within UTokyo meant one's chances for being hired are dim...if one's not practically shut out altogether.
My son attends one of those “free” colleges that comes with a post-grad service commitment. Oh, and the potential for the ultimate sacrifice. Definitely not free.