What’s wrong with free public college?

low income students usually pay very low rates of tuition at the institutions they attend

A lucky coincidence.

Why not start charging (appropriately means-tested) tuition for public high school? At least for junior and senior years?
1. The population who stay in public high school for all four years are much more advantaged than the ones who drop out.
2. The means test means that you’re not excluding people too poor to afford tuition. Any issues with transparency can be addressed by better communication.
3. To the natural counterpoint that a much higher proportion of the public completes high school than completes a four-year college education, you could compensate for this by making the means test more generous–say, everyone up to the 60th or 70th family income percentile pays no tuition. This heightens the distributive implications.
4. On the margin, you might discourage educational investment, but you could use the funding to do better-targeted investments in educational achievement, like childhood nutrition, lead abatement, improving elementary schools for kids from low-income families, etc. And nearly all kids in affluent families are going to complete high school anyway.
5. This point isn’t raised in the article (unless I missed it), but it’s true in both contexts that the subsidy for public institutions discourages parents from sending their kids to private schools, and you might wonder whether that’s a worthy use of public dollars.

I think there are a couple good responses, but they sound against this critique of free college, too:
1. Reversing the normative premise of 5. above, it would actually be bad if higher tuition costs for higher-income families meant that their kids shifted from public to private institutions: it probably makes the public offerings worse and it weakens the democratic and integrative effects of public education.
2. Perhaps more importantly, there’s a kind of implicit accounting gimmickry here. The idea is, we have some sum of money and need to decide how to spend it, and it’s not optimal to spend it on rich kids. But taxation and spending are two sides of the same coin. A means test on free tuition is economically similar to a progressive income tax: it reduces the financial resources of high-income households and it also distorts labor/leisure tradeoffs by reducing the utility of earning a higher pre-tax income. Distributively it’s slightly different because only affluent households with children are affected by means-testing tuition subsidies–but why is that good? More plausibly, maybe people don’t think about tuition means tests when they make their decisions about employment, so the incentive effect is weaker because the implicit tax is less transparent, but I’m not sure I want public policy to rely on that.

Like the argument, and given the assumption – taxes on wealth – agree with it.

However:

“I can’t speak for Kailey, but I was (naively) a bit shocked when reading the Warren and Sanders proposals how thin and lacking in detail they were, and how clear it was that they had not consulted anyone who knew anything about higher education funding as it currently works.”

It’s possible, if one were to be cynical, to think that the logic is running the other way. If we offer free college do we think that will gain the votes to tax wealth?

And my basic attitude towards politics is always “Am I being cynical enough?”

I have a very simple question: is there anything wrong with university education in Germany, Austria, France, Scandinavia, Scotland etc. ?

Because it’s free in all of these countries.

Sanders’s requirement that states participating in the free public college not spend any more money on administrators, if it is serious as opposed to crowd-pleasing, reveals that he doesn’t know what administrators do (or what “administrators” means).

There’s a disproportionate number of academics and academia-adjacent people in the progressive coalition, and griping about administrators is pretty common . . . even though the expenditures they complain about are usually for full departments rather than top level salaries, and we have so much administrative staff now because of the demand for the functions they do plus legal compliance.

I think the issue with this position is basically you are conceding to right wingers that we don’t have enough resources to properly fund both public k-12 education AND public post-secondary. We do and we should.

I’ve never succeeeded in establishing the general principle behind this argument. Government programmes that don’t redistribute resources downwards should be marketised? Seems like a lot of stuff is going to get marketised if that’s applied consistently. Roads, trains, culture, pensions, healthcare, … Gosh it almost seems like left-wing window dressing for neoliberalism, especially when we have perfectly simple ways for the government to address distribution directly through taxes, benefits, employment regulation and services that address deprivation, such as housing.

“student services — essential when you enroll significant numbers of first gen and low income students”

This claim deserves some skepticism. I think its unconditional embrace has helped pervert the mission of higher ed (and helped misspend resources).

I wouldn’t be enthused, though, about making rail travel free for everyone but reserving first class carriages for mainly affluent people who did really well in their excellent schools and third class for mainly working class and poor people who did badly at their not excellent schools.

I agree that would be odd but I guess the slightly more realistic scenario would be a socialist government making public transport free nationwide despite it being at present of a much higher standard in London than in the regions. I would support that despite the inequities because the principle of free transport seems valuable and they can be reduced over time.

I think roads, the state pension and the NHS are the most straightforward comparisons because they’re all things the government provides for free which in practice disproportionately benefit the better off, but I don’t see that as a left-wing reason for privatisation or user charges and I doubt you do either.

Thanks for the piece Harry–and as a first-gen collegiate myself I found it quite convincing (though I knew already a bit of your thinking on this). I have one question about your view about administrative salaries however. Could there be an almost inverse proportional relationship between the usefulness of administrators versus cost? In my own experience lower-tier administrators are incredibly important for the reasons you cite, and many of them cost little more or sometimes even much less than faculty, but there are any number of higher admins that make very high salaries with little to show that they are all that important to student success in any well-demonstrated way. So why couldn’t there be selective paring of admins based on a student-success cost analysis? Again, good work.

All sorts of problems in the US system (and quite a few others) can be traced to high levels of stratification. All of the scandals around Ivy League admissions for example reflect massive demand for a very limited (and mostly static) number of places.

Based on Australian experience, one possible solution is to upgrade second-tier public institutions, and fund them on the same basis as what are currently flagship.

With more difficulty, pressure could be placed on the Ivies and similar to take in more undergrads as a condition of public funding.

All of the scandals around Ivy League admissions for example reflect massive demand for a very limited (and mostly static) number of places.

Maybe I’ve read too much Dr Seuss but my gut feeling is this would still be a problem if Amherst provided every bit as good an education as Harvard, which is another reason I’m sceptical that “educational inequality”* is at the root of our ills.

(* rather than, say, intergenerational accumulation and transmission of economic, social and cultural capital and their easy convertibility)

The issue with professional sports in academia is not so much the revenue, despite the size of some TV broadcasting rights contracts. It’s the funding for the sports venues, an enormous fixed capital investment that should I think be recaptured. I suspect the overall benefits of pro sports edifices for the university are similar to the benefits of private pro sports edifices for the local community.

Speaking of fixed costs, particularly in natural sciences, truly elite research institutions are tightly integrated with government and private corporations (the state’s role in practice I think is critical.) To some degree, genius and luck in such research is not a freely reproducible good . That’s why this innovation or discovery can occur in unexpected places. But insofar as money does cause scientific discovery, the government/corporate favorites tend to be the Sixties Yankees: They buy all the most promising players?

I’ve read most of the paper at this point (and I think I’ve hit the critical parts to what I want to discuss) and of course we’ve talked about this before Harry.

My fundamental frustration with this topic is that I agree with you up to a point. K12 and particularly K/pre-K are more underfunded than higher education. They are better impact points for applying extra funding under any reasonable metric we could apply.

If we apply just that logic, how do we avoid the conclusion that large portions of higher education should be completely eliminated and the funding transferred to K12 or pre-K programs? Is the conclusion that… we should? I don’t believe it is, and I’m left wondering if not, why not? I think part of the answer might lie in various grants that are earmarked for low-income or minoritized students, which you address in the paper discussing the Pell Grant program. If expanding that program is competitive with extra funding for K12 etc, then how do we make that happen? I believe it is fairly well established that making minority-benefit programs universal increases the benefits available to the target minority in general by vastly increasing public support for the programs. Is that not what a “free public college” proposal is doing in principle, and if so shouldn’t we be evaluating it in that light?

I’m not going to defend Sanders’s & Warren’s specific proposals. Free public college is not something I’m personally invested in. I’m presently struggling with how the state of Wisconsin is continually reducing funding, so the student tuition funding thread is not exactly close to the top of my priority list. But public college and access to it for lower income and/or minoritized students is something that I care a lot about. I don’t have answers here, but the way we’re all approaching this discussion feels wrong.

I’m used to writing comments where I feel like I have a complete thought to share. This is, uh, not that. Hopefully it’s useful to the discussion anyway!

Comment above:
I have a very simple question: is there anything wrong with university education in Germany, Austria, France, Scandinavia, Scotland etc. ?

First, although different in each country they are not necessarily free today.

Second, since they are free or low cost more students want to go to them, so the demand is limited by some sort of tracking often with a test at some point around the 6th or 8th grade that puts the kids into a college or not track, although this has been changing somewhat in many places as well. Germany has definitely going to college high schools, maybe going to college high schools, and definitely not going to college high schools – but also a tradition of paid apprenticeships and training programs and a lot of certification needed for those jobs.

If they don’t go on about it, who will?

The answer may surprise you!
https://schoolleaders.thekeysupport.com/school-evaluation-and-improvement/inspection/whole-school-inspection-criteria/cultural-capital-ofsted/

Ofsted’s definition may not be quite what I (or Bourdieu as I read him) had in mind but I do hope they discover hexis before they get shut down…

someone does have to go on about it

No, as I understand it, the first rule of cultural capital club is you don’t talk about cultural capital club (“effortless superiority” and all that). You have to display it, which is a different thing. And the British elite type specifically has a marked anti-intellectual current, hence five years of journalists lol’ing at Corbyn for having read Ulysses.

All of this was in a parenthetical suggestion at the end of a comment but I was just challenging (again) the idea that superior “education” (or worse still “excellence”) is what enables the privileged to earn more and should therefore be equalised. I find this too functional and even exculpatory and it seems more like Becker than Bourdieu. It downplays the social networking function of schools and universities and the objectionability of the trade of money, connections and credentials they increasingly facilitate.

A couple points:

Elite private universities in the US, such as the Ivys and near-Ivys routinely run north of $70,000 per year PLUS room and board which can easily add another $20,000. Accordingly, they are not only out of reach to the ‘average’ family, they are out of reach (or at least not easily afforded) for families making say $200 or 250,000 a year. The kid that ‘just misses’ at Harvard is not typically an inner-city minority kid that couldn’t swing the out of pocket expenses – that kid never applied in the first place. Rather its an extremely bright child of two professional parents that look at laying out $90k a year and decide that a full pay ticket to State U is a better spend that borrowing in the private market (i.e. bank loans, not Fed backed) to go Ivy. This is the family Saunders Warren would subsidize.

My biggest knock on the preference for funding K-12 is that, on form, states are pretty unimaginative with additional funding. History says when a state chooses to add funding to higher ed it means: Higher teacher pay and building lots of fancy new high-schools with really kick-ass gyms and athletic fields. In many states, the higher teacher pay does little to attract any better teaching talent, it just remunerates the existing staff better with no corresponding outcomes. Said differently, more money doesn’t turn mutton into lamb.

Gyms are of course nice, but they don’t do a lot for literacy.

“Comment above:
I have a very simple question: is there anything wrong with university education in Germany, Austria, France, Scandinavia, Scotland etc. ?”

Neither got the intellectual nor the emotional energy to get into the core debate right now, but this sure deservers an angry drive by comment:
Yes, yes, yes oh so much……

Let me give you some recent unasked real life examples:
Prof: “You definitely should consider a term abroad, since you will get better grades than from me with 100% certainty, especially those Americans, people returning from there always only got As”

“I would probably get a b+ in my test myself, nothing wrong with that”.
“Some students still get an A, they look very normal, so don’t worry it is possible”

Turns out he was talking about the first term BA course, and all the students that had an A went to schools that were teaching the subject for 7 years, while most schools did not teach it at all. Usually lower social class students go to the schools that do teach the subject extensively, so this is not about class discrimination, by the way. (Granted, the truly privileged Oxbridge equivalent would never have sent their kids to that department, and they also know in advance in contrast to many others)

“I´ve recently compared our Prüfungsordnung with the one in psychology, ours is better, since we just kick out students that are obviously not talented for our degree (after they did not pass some classes with 50% + fail rates fast enough early on), they instead start to have conversations about the reasons, torturing students unnecessary….”

That would be the psychology program that is harder to get into than Harvard if we talk US equivalents, and still enjoys to fail at least 30% in statistics classes. They even got some disgusting hazing ritual like a real elite University around statistics classes that regularly makes first year students cry. In short, even his “too nice” comparison is anything but a touchy-feely degree, rather another somewhat less dysfunctional horror show.

“20% of the test will be about the guest lecture, and there will be no script, so you have to attend it. And the guest lecture will not be during my regular lecture hours, but in addition. If you are sick, too bad, ask your fellow students for their notes”

Naturally, the guest lecture is during the regular lecture times of another course students often take in combination, with a guest lecture and no script in the same course. And there also is yet another guest lecture from another Prof with the same system…….

Fellow students: “How dare you ask for the script, just go to the lecture yourself (or ask your friends…)*” (if they talk to you at all)

Other Prof in the first lecture: “Any students from our US partner University here?”.
“No? Good, you see, my lecture is all very easy, but this is the point the US students still walk out and take another course…”
(Naturally, at least 80% of Germans that might read that comment will think this tells US what’s wrong with US, not German education).

Now this is an extreme example, and part of it is just dark pedagogics (which is bad enough), not actual pleasure in failing as many people as possible as it might sound like.

The Profs probably also think if someone like me asks a fellow student for his notes, he will get them without any problems – not an unreasonable assumption, since students used to be rather collectivist collaborative against the enemy when the Profs pulled some stunt like the guest lecture not too long ago, so even the social outsiders would get the notes without any problems.

These days with the corona effect, all the social distance among even the natural insiders and a massive increase in individualism (grading tends to get somewhat easier if the other students are worse after all, since this is not quite engineering or computer science culture where they celebrate their 95% failure rates**). I’m pretty sure it’s a struggle for everyone, and they just share among 2-3 typically instrumental cooperation partners in that particular program.

*Ok, I made the exact answer up for dramatic purpose, this was actually the response during my previous Master where overall culture was rather more like in the US (failing classes was not really an option after some degree of selection during admission), from the daughter of a priest. I did get those notes in the end – from a Russian psychology BA who also complained I woke her up by writing into the master program’s WhatsApp group at night…… I’ll probably get all the notes this time too in the end.

**Many readers now probably think it is possible to just repeat those tests as often as one wants, or think I exaggerate. To some extent I do – that’s sure not the norm, but it does happen. And there typically are only 3 attempts. Others might wonder how this works out at all with anyone graduating. The “trick” in computer science is usually changing subject while de facto still studying the same and possibly dodging a particular crazy subject outright in the process- e.g. you failed business computer science and switch to biology computer science then to basic computer science etc…..

Sweden is probably OK overall (but there is certainly a lot wrong there too), and sometimes German University also works very different from described here. French Universities are also a bit of a horror show. Scotland is not that cheap any more even for locals I’d guess? Austria should be a lot like Germany.

You should however note that even when German higher education works well, it does so in Germany. German students tend to be particular self-directed/disciplined already as undergraduates, and are thus rather cheap to teach. The social support/tutoring/profs looking after the undisciplined students to get their work done etc. you can expect in many other countries just does not exist. They really are more disciplined on average compared to almost any other country – and if they are not, they better have very privileged and patient parents, that are also willing to get very involved otherwise they just don’t graduate.

Land of opportunity:

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blockquote>In reality, 43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff (students admitted based on these criteria are referred to as ‘ALDCs’, which stands for ‘athletes’, ‘legacies’, ‘dean’s interest list’ and ‘children’ of Harvard employees). The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete.

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blockquote>
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/harvard-university-students-smart-iq

Btw many those European countries have systems that are considerably less stratified than the UK’s, if that’s what concerns you (it does me).

Left-neoliberalism: capitalism is unjust, oppressive, unequal, wasteful, elitist and patrimonial and the solution is… more markets! (And managers. And means-testing. And debt mmm don’t forget the debt.) A form of socialism so enlightened it never fails to appeal to financial traders like Joe and neoliberal think tank fellows like Worstall. It’s like the famous BBC interview with the Sex Pistols when after expounding on everything they hated about the world they were asked what they were going to do about it. “We’re going to make it worse?”

Trader Joe 43: “This is the family Saunders Warren would subsidize.”

Is that true? Do Sanders/Warren call for subsidizing students to attend the Ivy Leagues?

@35: “Germany has definitely going to college high schools, maybe going to college high schools, and definitely not going to college high schools – but also a tradition of paid apprenticeships and training programs and a lot of certification needed for those jobs.”

This is more or less correct, nevertheless I believe that the education system overall is far less stratified than in the US. The biggest difference however in my view is that the concept of elite education and therefore elite institutions simply does not exist, and nobody generally will know or care what particular university you attended. E. g. the current Chancellor studied law at Hamburg University, which has > 40000 students. Which is an example of lawyers being way overrepresented in German politics (as elsewhere), but not an example of an elite reproducing itself via elite institutions. Studying law in Germany is challenging enough but not financially expensive, there are no law schools btw and the exams are state exams.

We had it in England prior to Blair. Scotland still does. Many European countries do, or something close.

Without wishing to get pulled into a digression, and bowing to your superior wisdom on this topic, I would nevertheless express a degree of scepticism that “free education” commonly exists in in the gattungswesen sense I referred to (which includes the freedom to pursue such education) without freedom from capitalism (following from the points made in “Critique of the Gotha Programme” – nihil novum sub sole, etc.). To my mind, that “European countries have systems that are considerably less stratified than the UK’s” is less an exoneration of European countries, and more a damning indictment of the UK. Of course, views, as they say, may differ (and as this is somewhat “off topic”, I should probably leave it there)…

May I suggest you invite Marshall Steinbaum for a counterpoint on this? I believe he would point to the fact that education is a public good, and it is harmful to think of it as an assset that accrues to people that get an education. Also, that doing so entails a lot of debt on the less well off of those that do go to college, and a lot of corruption, bloating and undue influence of donors and benefactors.

Also, I’d point that one should never do distributional analysis on the spending side alone. Higher income taxes would be a totally fine way to recoup that spending on people who do end up earning more. If we were to test every public policy for distributional analysis, we’d find out that many libraries, parcs and services do end up serving the better off, and we’d hollow out our public goods.

Harry, I’m sure someone one can write a well-sourced and -argued paper that privatizing / monetizing the NHS is beneficial for everyone – and yet, there currently doesn’t seem to be much popular demand for such arguments.

Why is that? Because healthcare in the UK is considered a public good that should be provided free of charge to the citizens – and that’s the end of that (for now at least).

What you are doing with respect to education is arguing from a starting point where the horse has already left the barn, and university education has already ceased to be a free public good. Now that point hasn’t been reached in several major European countries with excellent education systems and I think that’s a very good thing.

Attempts to establish tuition fees in e.g. Germany around 15 years ago (or rather in the German states, as education is mainly a matter that falls under the responsibility of the states) have met with massive resistance comparable to what I imagine would be the reaction to attempts to privatize/ monetize the NHS in the UK. The end result being that there are no tuition fees in Germany.

So if you look at the whole matter in this way, you might gain a different perspective.

NBZ @48: Thank you for the figures. (Note btw that the discussion re subsidization here relates to public colleges not private ones, so private universities, elite or otherwise, would not be covered. TJ’s comment was ambiguously worded on this point.)

Harry @53: Thank you for the clarification(s).

For the record, I agree with the conclusion that free public college in the U.S. is not a good proposal, for the reasons laid out in the OP. Since I agree with the conclusion and the reasoning in the OP, I don’t have to read the paper.

Where did I say that? I just asked you to read our paper, and engage with the arguments.

My guess is that novakant was not taking full account of the logical distinction between the conclusion that ‘making public higher education free is not a good public policy proposal for the US’ and the conclusion that ‘making public higher education not free is a good public policy proposal for countries other than the US (where it is currently free)’.

What principles then should govern the public distribution of education? The paper gives two;
-increasing education
-equalising education or the beneficial outcomes that result from education
I think this is an extremely narrow view of the values at stake. Perhaps we could add:
-societal need (we’ve enough trademark lawyers now, thanks…)
-developing individuals different talents according to their preferences and temperaments
-the inherent value of the subject being taught (Greek > Klingon?)
-protecting the distinctive values of educational institutions from those of profit-seeking business
-allowing young people a glimpse of a world outside of capitalism
I don’t believe any of these are well-served by a market/fee model and the last is being destroyed by it.

@55 TM

If you read my comment at 43 more carefully (I admit my wording was a bit obtuse)…the point I’m making is not that Warren-Sanders funds an Ivy education (it wouldn’t as they are private). My point is that when this upper middle class kid doesn’t get into the elite private school of his choice – he’ll fall back on taking a Free trip to the likes of University of Michigan, U of Virginia or any of the other highly ranked public schools because even as an out of state student this would be free tuition (under the proposal) and accordingly a far better economic decision than going to some second tier private school.

As Harry and others have noted, the incremental subsidy (relative to the current disjointed policies) largely accrue to the benefit of the comparatively more well off since typically families in the $100K or less range are already getting sizeable subsidies if they seek them. Its the $150k to $300k tranche, that right now probably gets no grant money (only loans) that would benefit most greatly. Those above $300K most likely have resources to privately fund whatever education they choose.

Thanks also to NBZ @48 who much better articulated my point and provided the specific data my point lacked.

“ Imagine a society in which college is pretty much unattainable for students who are not from the elite, and is a prerequisite for entry into the elite.”

Except that isn’t what they are imagining is it? They are imagining (in my
opinion) a just society where ALL people have access to high quality public good that allow them to fully meet their potential. I would have assumed that most of the commenters and authors on this Left Wing Blog would agree that is the World we should be striving to build.

Ah. Well in that case this really has been a very long dialogue of the deaf. We’re arguing against the policy in our, actual, environment, which is much more like what I was imagining than what I’d like to see, and we make that abundantly clear. Glad to have that sorted out.

My previous comments went missing (although I’m not sure if they added that much). I disagree with your prescriptions for the US and I agree with Bernie Sanders’s, Jscobin’s, etc mainly because I think you are ignoring basic normative issues about the limits of markets and the injustice of financial barriers to learning. (I guess I also disagree that “your environment” is as immutable as you take to be and in particular that the US government can’t raise taxes on the rich.) That doesn’t necessarily mean I think my preferences (or the principles try motivate them) apply in any national context but you might be interested in what the UN Declaration of Human Rights says on the matter:

What does the right to education entail?

Primary education that is free, compulsory and universal
Secondary education, including technical and vocational, that is generally available, accessible to all and progressively free
Higher education, accessible to all on the basis of individual capacity and progressively free

I did offer considerations in support of my view that the two principles on which the analysis of your paper is based are two narrow in #71 and I don’t see why they shouldn’t apply to the US. Could I also point that at one point in the paper you recommended the UK system? If you agree doesn’t work in the UK perhaps you should make that clear.

Yes, it’s been a dialogue of the deaf: I said your distributional analysis neglects important ethical principles and you accused me of making a absolute, geographically universal claim I never made and pointed out it doesn’t apply to brains in vats on Twin Earth. Maybe not, but it still applies in US, which is all I ever claimed.