Tuition-Free Higher Education in the United States
An undergraduate student at a US university contacted me recently with some interesting questions about the possibilities and benefits of tuition-free higher education in the United States. In this unusually brief column, I will reproduce his questions and my answers, after which I will make a couple of short points that were inspired by my answer to one of the questions.
Question 1: Do you think that free college in America is possible?
Me: Sadly, I don't. We're of course a wealthy enough country to do it, and we've done it in the not-too-distant past (1960's, 70's, and into the 80's), but the US's political situation makes it impossible. The Republicans were apoplectic about former President Biden's student loan partial forgiveness plan, which was quite minimalist. I can't see how a national program of free higher ed stands a chance politically for the foreseeable future.
Question 2: College is free in other places like Germany, Norway and France. Do you think they have certain conditions that allow them to do this? Conditions that can’t or won't be met by America?
Me: The conditions that allow those countries to do this (while we don't) are not economic, because they're not richer than the US. Their people (and therefore their politicians) view free higher ed as a public responsibility and a public benefit. The US public largely doesn't, and even if a majority of Americans did, that still wouldn't guarantee political success. (Compare reproductive rights, gun control, affordable health care, and so on.)
Question 3: Do you believe if education is available to all, that it would diminish the value of a degree?
Me: Definitely not. The value of a degree is not determined by how much a person pays for it but by how much it enhances their lifetime prospects. As long as universities continue to enforce academic standards — as they do in the countries you mentioned, without harming the value of German, Norwegian, or French degrees — then the degrees will still be valuable. As a thought experiment, consider that different American students pay very different amounts for their degrees (even at the same university), based on differing amounts of grants, student loans, in-state/out-of-state tuition rates, and so on. Yet no one says that the kid who just got a BA from Big U in PoliSci after paying an average net cost of, say, $10k per year has a degree that is worth less than a kid who paid $30k per year for a BA in PoliSci from Big U. It's the same degree.
Question 4: What do you believe are the main benefits or detriments to free college?
Me: No detriments. Benefits include saving all kinds of money and time for students/parents as well as universities by not having to deal with FAFSA and all the rest of that bureaucracy. It would also encourage non-rich students who might otherwise be scared off by the sticker price to apply to college. Society gains when talented kids are able to develop their talents. Higher ed pays off many times over.
My additional thoughts have to do with what I called a thought experiment in my answer to Question 3. As an economist, I initially went with my first inclination to try to answer that question as a matter of how degrees are valued, in terms of how they enhance the net lifetimes earnings of degree holders. So even though people might say that "it can't be worth anything if it's free," that is obviously wrong. If everyone received a free degree in return for nothing -- not only no money, but no effort or proof of having learned anything -- then of course the degree would be worthless. But that is not how tuition-free higher ed works.
And that is where the thought experiment comes in. We have what economists have in recent years come to call a "natural" experiment, which is a situation in which the world provides something similar to a control group/experimental group comparison. Here, we have students who are paying a wide range of prices for the same education, so if the value of degrees were related to how much actual (not sticker-price) tuition each student paid, then we would see students getting rates of return on their educations that are correlated to their unique price paid. And that is not at all what we see.
The reason I wanted to go back over this here is that the notion of students paying different amounts of money for the same education also shows up in the most plain vanilla feature of American higher ed: the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition. I mentioned that feature briefly in my answer to Question 3 above, but the additional point is that Republicans -- and just as ridiculously, the neoliberals among Democrats -- freak out about student loan forgiveness programs because they are supposedly "badly targeted," meaning that across-the-board forgiveness programs help rich grads as much as they help poor grads (which often correlates to how rich or poor they were when they started college).
But that logic would apply just as much to in-state/out-of-state differences. I know of no state that differentiates its in-state discount (or, if you prefer, its out-of-state premium) based on the financial condition of the students upon enrollment or after graduation. Yet somehow, no one jumps up and down as says that it is an abomination to mis-target such largess. To be clear, I know that some scholars have made versions of that argument; but what is notable is that none of the Republican and Democratic politicians who hyperventilate about loan forgiveness are manning the barricades to force, say, the University of Georgia to charge its wealthier in-state residents out-of-state rates.
It is almost as if people have no idea what they are talking about when they scream about paying money to allow people to attend colleges and universities. Can you imagine!
- Neil H. Buchanan