Three reasons why free community college is a bad idea
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s also no such thing as free healthcare or free housing. Why should free community college be any different?
President Obama’s recently-announced plans to make the first two years of community college free to all will go down in history as one of the worst rhetorical and economic pieces of rubbish in the 21st century.
First, consider that community college is basically already free.
The average community college tuition is $3,300 a year, but families earning less than $24,000 a year can apply for federal Pell grants that provide up to $5,730 a year in aid. Additionally, community colleges are already heavily government-subsidized: The American Association of Community Colleges reports that more than 60% of community college costs are subsidized by federal, state, and local government aid. Now ask yourself what exactly is the President’s $60 billion plan going to pay for?
Next, consider how this plan will actually make community college more expensive.
Since 1978, the cost of higher education has increased by over 1100%. This means that $11 today buys the same amount of education $1 did in 1978, which is nearly three times greater than overall inflation over the same time period.
There are several reasons why college costs have skyrocketed over the past thirty-five years. Some of these reasons include rising faculty salaries, rising administrative costs, and investments in expensive technology and amenities. While all of these are significant, the single-greatest factor has been the increase in demand for higher education.
As increases in demand outpace increases in supply, the price of education must necessarily rise. Yet, it’s not as if every year there are scores of people who can’t attend college at all because there isn’t any room for them; really, it seems almost as if everyone who wants to attend college can in one way or another. So it seems then that demand and supply every year are almost equal. What is really happening is that 4-year private institutions like Cornell are doing most of the price-raising while state and community colleges are absorbing the excess demand. The bursting-at-the-seems enrollment demands on state and community colleges is driving up their costs and thus their tuitions.
In 1975, 21.9% of Americans aged 25 to 29 had at least a bachelor’s degree. That figure rose to 33.5% in 2013. The number of foreign students attending US universities, a figure that has grown 72% in just fifteen years, also contributes to the overall rising demand for higher education. This enormous rise in demand, especially domestically, could only have been made possible by US government subsidies. By pumping more dollars than the natural market does into the education market via grants and loans, universities simply respond appropriately by raising tuition. It’s no different from the government subsidizing, say, automobile purchases and car dealers responding by raising the prices of cars. All of this subsidization started with the GI Bill in 1944, and even then colleges responded to the massive subsidies by raising tuitions. There was, however, justification for the GI Bill: namely, the enormous demographic shifts and economic dislocations caused by the Second World War and the great sacrifices returning soldiers had made.
If the government as proposed provides $6 billion a year for the next ten years in the community college market, then the government will essentially raise the price of community college by $6 billion a year for the next ten years. This might not be perceived immediately, but it will happen. As politicians always do, President Obama is dangling “free” stuff in front of his party’s electorate by selling out future generations.
Finally, consider that community colleges in their current state are a worthless investment.
Would making the first two years of community college “free” raise their dismal 22% graduation rates? The populists argue that the relaxed burden of having to pay for tuition will improve current student graduation rates, but only 20% of full-time students at community college—meaning those who ostensibly are putting maximum effort into college and not outside jobs—earn an associate’s degree in three years, even though it’s only supposed to take two years to get one. In other words, the graduation of full-time students is actually less than the overall graduation rate.
Besides, the track record of free government stuff isn’t very laudable. For example, library cards are free, but a recent Renaissance Learning report found that the average college freshmen reads at a 7th grade level. Education from 8th to 12th grades is also free, but apparently those five years spent in school don’t amount to much.
Rather than lowering their admission standards, real community college reform would come in the form of increasing them. Such reform would also require students receiving federal aid to pursue meaningful studies in business, STEM, or vocational fields. Community college should be the domain of older adults returning to school and young adults seeking job-specific training in nursing, welding, plumbing, accountancy, etc.
Even community college students say that community college isn’t for everyone. Ezra Collin Cornell, a senior at Tompkins Cortland Community College, says that, “People don’t have to go to [community college]” and those who do attend them for free “would not work very hard to pass classes.”
Contrary to what President Obama says, free community college is not a “middle-class economics” initiative. Simply going through the motions and coasting through two years of free 13th and 14th grades doesn’t guarantee you a middle-class life in the same way coasting through four years at Cornell doesn’t guarantee you a middle-class life.