Making state college education free is a cornerstone of several progressive agendas, most notably that of Bernie Sanders. While I support the concept, as usual the devil is in the details.
First, are we talking strictly about college in the traditional sense of two-year community colleges and four-year institutions conveying a Bachelor’s Degree or higher? Or should we include trade schools? Traditionally, blue collar trades have been looked down on by those in white collar occupations and communities. Nonetheless, a lot of young people have opted not to attend college in favor of learning a specific trade. Under the current system, some of these students have been taken advantage of by for-profit trade schools and “institutes”, ending up with thousands of dollars of student loan debt and certification in a field that offers few true employment prospects, due either to a shortage of positions, a surplus of qualified applicants, deficiencies in the training the student received, or all of the above.
On the other hand, many people have managed to avoid the debt trap, either by learning their trade at a community college or by simply apprenticing with a contractor or other employer. The irony, of course, is that now they are making a decent living, and stop for coffee at places where the baristas have a pretty-much useless (at least at the moment) degree and are living with parents in a vain attempt to pay down their student loans.
Note: Just to be clear, by trades I’m not talking here about manufacturing jobs, of which several million have been out-sourced to foreign countries. By tradesmen I mean electricians, plumbers, auto body guys, those who repair conditioning units and appliances, aircraft and automotive mechanics, and some semi-white-collar careers such as medical technicians or those in on-site IT support.
So, do we include trade schools? I would say, yes.
Second question: Are any strings attached? If you drop out, or don’t graduate because you can’t pass various final proficiency tests, are you then responsible for the tuition money advanced by your state or the federal government? This leads to questions three and four: Should states even be attempting to finance college? And what about out-of-state students? How would Nebraska residents and taxpayers feel about paying the freight for students from Florida, Hawaii, or California. What about the cost differentials between states? Four years at North Dakota State is considerably cheaper than at Cal Berkeley. How would North Dakota residents feel about paying for someone from their state to attend UCLA or Virginia?
Similarly, a California resident pays about $25K a year less per year at a UC school than someone from another state. But if you limit free public college tuition to in-state students, you eliminate the cultural cross-pollination that occurs when students from different states and parts of the country are thrown into the educational melting pot.(One of the reasons that younger people have become more tolerant and accepting of people from other races, ethnic backgrounds, and regions of the country is that, while at college, they have found these people to be just…people.)
In addition, what about fields of study that are not taught at a public college in a particular student’s home state? You’re not likely to find an oceanography major at Kansas State or the University of Tennessee. Conversely, want a great degree program in agriculture? Nebraska or Missouri could be right up your alley…except if you’re home state is Delaware.
Given the other funding demands on states, doesn’t it make more sense to have free college funded at the federal level?
Question five: By “free” do we mean just tuition? Tuition and books? Campus housing? A meal plan? More importantly, a full meal plan, including three squares on Saturday and Sunday? Ever compared the prices of food between, say, metro NYC or L.A. and a small town out in the boondocks? As someone likes to say, Yuuuge difference.
Question six: Do we limit this strictly to U.S. citizens? What about the children of legal resident aliens? What about someone who is here on a work visa, taking a job (theoretically or in fact) from a citizen, and then their kid gets a free ride through a world-class educational institution, courtesy of the U.S Treasury? This is going to be problematic at best, and probably an impossible pill for many to swallow. But courts have ruled that legal residents have almost all the same rights and responsibilities as citizens. (Free defense counsel, trial by jury, subject to military draft, right to enter into contracts, obtain licenses and permits for everything from fishing and driving to flying planes or practicing medicine.)
Question seven: Do we also pay for advanced degrees? As has become apparent to most of my friends with college-age kids, a BS or a BA doesn’t mean much these days. A Masters Degree is almost imperative in many fields.
And now for the big question:What about private colleges and universities? Sure, degrees from public universities such as UC Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, and Penn State carry a lot of prestige. But do they measure up, not just in terms of presumed educational quality, but in the even more important area of networks and contacts, with Harvard, Yale, Duke, or Stanford? By limiting socialized college funding to state schools, are we reinforcing a caste system where degrees from prestigious private schools are not only life-long markers of superiority but also the equivalent of an E-Z-Pass for the on-ramp to the career highway?
This brings me to the subject of sortition, qualified random drawing. What if the federal government also footed the bill for certain students to attend private colleges? Prestigious private colleges routinely get far more qualified applicants than they can enroll. Last year USC admitted 6,300 freshmen…from 59,000 applications. An admissions director for a top Ivy League school once told a friend of mine that during the admission review period his day always starts the same way: He arrives at the office to find four tall stacks of applications on his desk. He promptly throws two of those stacks on the floor and never looks at them. Ever. Why? “Because in those other two daily stacks I will find more qualified students than we will ever have room to admit.”
So, how about having a free college financing program include provision for private schools to set aside a percentage — 10%, 15%, 20% — of their annual fall admissions for students that meet certain universal academic minimums, and then conduct a lottery for the lucky winners? The minimum criteria might be something like all remaining applicants whose SAT or ACT scores were at least 80% of the average score of students admitted through the normal selection process.
Imagine, for a moment, those drawings from each school being live-streamed over the internet: all across America, students and their parents glued to the screen as name after name comes out the big hopper. Must see TV for a lot of families. And a life-changing experience for the lucky winners.
Note: I used to be active in sports and I’ve seen the life-changing results of scholarships given out in women’s sports. I’ve seen a kid — from an Indian reservation, no less — be the first person in her family to attend college, and end up with a degree from UCLA. I watched a kid from semi-rural Texas end up at San Diego State; a kid from suburban So Cal go to Georgia Tech; one from the beach in L.A. to the Big Apple. Life changing, and life-expanding, experiences all.
Translating big concepts into detailed, workable programs is a core function of government, especially at the national level. It’s why the air traffic control system, the FDA, interstate trucking regulations, and so forth are federally-run and federally-funded. The Restoration Amendments don’t have to pass for a fair and practical college financing program to be enacted, but I suspect it would be a lot easier to do so if they were.
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