Free college for all? Not so fast!

Like many ideas in the public arena, free college for all sounds appealing. Among other things, the idea taps into egalitarian ideals and outrage over skyrocketing tuition. It’s a populist line in many a progressive political campaign. But it’s a Bread and Circuses promise that has more holes than, well, Swiss cheese.

Let me stake on crystal clear position: Education is quite possibly the most important service that we as a society provides its populace. In the “Six Meetings Before Lunch” episode from the first season of “The West Wing,” written by Aaron Sorkin, character Sam Seaborn has a line that expresses it best:

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense.

Yet I’m here to argue against that last line, that it should be free to all. But before I do, another Seaborn quote from the same episode, just to put into perspective some of the issues we have with public schools, issues that some use to justify taking funding away from public schools:

Public education has been a public policy disaster for 40 years. Having spent around four trillion dollars on public schools since 1965, the result has been a steady and inexorable decline in every measurable standard of student performance, to say nothing of health and safety.

Now I don’t have the data handy to back up or refute the latter, but I’d assert that money is only part of the equation for success. True, the funding for public education has been eviscerated by the tax cutting crown in local, state, and federal legislatures.

Let’s look at the difference in student success between public and private schools. Public schools, paid for by taxes, private schools, paid for by tuition payments directly by parents. Question: Which students are more likely to have consistent parents’ involvement in their children’s success, the ones who have taxes pay for the schooling or the ones who have schooling come directly out of their bank accounts?

Now I get it. The factors that lead to student success are far more myriad and far more complex than this. It was just a point to make, a point that we tend to be more involved in that which we are more directly invested.

I like to brag a bit about my university education, not only the school that I went to (the University of Washington, by the way, best school in the west, not that I’m biased or anything), but the tuition I paid. At the time I was a student there, full-time tuition was $351 per quarter. For al 3 years.

At this writing, quarterly tuition for in-state undergraduates is more than 10 times that: $3822. (To be fair, they don’t call it “tuition” anymore, just an accumulation of fees.)

I used to joke that the actual cost of school, even including books, supplies, and so on, wasn’t the biggest outlay. That was just living while I went to school, paying rent, buying food, the (very occasional) clothes shopping, and (even more occasional) entertainment. Sure, the way rents have skyrocketed, that may still be true, but there’s no reason that college tuition has skyrocketed at a rate, way, way, way past the rate of inflation.

No rational reason, anyway. Republicans at all levels of government have systematically devalued education and derided intelligence, then cut taxes and balanced local and state budgets on the backs of universities. This has resulted in state schools increasing tuition to make up for the losses. These massive increases have had serious consequences for students, students who can no longer afford the educations they want and have to borrow more and more and more.

To be fair, I needed loans to help me get through school, and I graduated with about $10K in loans. It took me several years to pay them back, longer than ideal because I suffered periods of joblessness after layoffs during which I needed to get forebearances. With the skyrocketing tuitions, present day students owe much, much more when they graduate, the massive amounts owed by so many students one driver to some political candidates calling for the elimination of student loan debt.

One other solution is to make public university tuition free for all. Indeed, some lower-level colleges are doing this, such as at City College of San Francisco making tuition free for San Francisco residents. California residents who do not live in San Francisco pay $49 per credit hour, or $490 for full-time study per semester.

This is actually a significant jump; tuition not all that long ago was $28 per credit. But again, funding woes drove the college to raise tuition, making it tougher to afford, especially for poorer students, and the “solution” was to make tuition free for SF residents, paid for by a fund carved out of the city budget, which of course comes from taxes.

Getting back to the whole who pays thing, I think we value that which we pay for, which we work for. And that’s why I don’t think college should be free for all, just that it should cost a whole lot less.

For example, the City College example I noted above. Tuition, at $46 per credit, especially at the community/junior college level, has hit a level that makes it more difficult to get an education there. Well, instead of government stepping in to pay for all of it, what about if they pay for just part of it, leaving some to be paid for students. Say, $20 per credit or $200 per semester for full-time students.

I would assert that even making a small payment will result in students valuing what they get there more than if it was just handed to them.

I get it. “Free” is so alluring. But nothing is free. We work for what we get (well, unless you inherit it, but most of us don’t fall into that category), and some of our work also goes to help those who need a little leg up. That’s what we do if we want a decent society.

But I’ve experienced people who want my work, my skills for nothing, and I’ve seen others look to get the same thing from people who have the skills they need, “for exposure,” they say. No, just as you value what you can do, what you can contribute, so is it optimal to value what you get. If you give something, even a small amount, directly, for the value you get, then you will value what you get that much more.

So no, not totally free tuition for college everywhere. Just a valuing of education to the point where we set tuition at a level that’s both affordable to pay and won’t leave students graduating with crushing debt. That means reasonable tuition, augmented by government contribution, contribution that demonstrates the value we as a society put — or should put — on education.