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Why Free College Is Necessary

Higher education can’t solve inequality, but the debate about free college
tuition does something extremely valuable. It reintroduces the concept of
public good to education discourse.
Tressie McMillan Cottom ▪ Fall 2015

Student debt activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 2014 (Light Brigading /
Flickr)
This article is part of Dissent’sspecial issue of “Arguments on the Left.” Click to read contending
arguments from Matt Bruenig and Mike Konczal.

Free college is not a new idea, but, with higher education costs (and student loan debt)
dominating public perception, it’s one that appeals to more and more people—including
me. The national debate about free, public higher education is long overdue. But let’s
get a few things out of the way.

College is the domain of the relatively privileged, and will likely stay that way for the
foreseeable future, even if tuition is eliminated. As of 2012, over half of the U.S.
population has “some college” or postsecondary education. That category includes
everything from an auto-mechanics class at a for-profit college to a business degree
from Harvard. Even with such a broadly conceived category, we are still talking about
just half of all Americans.

Why aren’t more people going to college? One obvious answer would be cost,
especially the cost of tuition. But the problem isn’t just that college is expensive. It is
also that going to college is complicated. It takes cultural and social, not just economic,
capital. It means navigating advanced courses, standardized tests, forms. It means
figuring out implicit rules—rules that can change.

Eliminating tuition would probably do very little to untangle the sailor’s knot of
inequalities that make it hard for most Americans to go to college. It would not address
the cultural and social barriers imposed by unequal K–12 schooling, which puts a select
few students on the college pathway at the expense of millions of others. Neither would
it address the changing social milieu of higher education, in which the majority are now
non-traditional students. (“Non-traditional” students are classified in different ways
depending on who is doing the defining, but the best way to understand the category is
in contrast to our assumptions of a traditional college student—young, unfettered, and
continuing to college straight from high school.) How and why they go to college can
depend as much on things like whether a college is within driving distance or provides
one-on-one admissions counseling as it does on the price.

Given all of these factors, free college would likely benefit only an outlying group of
students who are currently shut out of higher education because of cost—students with
the ability and/or some cultural capital but without wealth. In other words, any
conversation about college is a pretty elite one even if the word “free” is right there in
the descriptor.

The discussion about free college, outside of the Democratic primary race, has also
largely been limited to community colleges, with some exceptions by state. Because I
am primarily interested in education as an affirmative justice mechanism, I would like all
minority-serving and historically black colleges (HBCUs)—almost all of which qualify as
four-year degree institutions—to be included. HBCUs disproportionately serve students
facing the intersecting effects of wealth inequality, systematic K–12 disparities, and
discrimination. For those reasons, any effort to use higher education as a vehicle for
greater equality must include support for HBCUs, allowing them to offer accessible
degrees with less (or no) debt.

The Obama administration’s free community college plan, expanded in July to include
grants that would reduce tuition at HBCUs, is a step in the right direction. Yet this is only
the beginning of an educational justice agenda. An educational justice policy must
include institutions of higher education but cannot only include institutions of higher
education. Educational justice says that schools can and do reproduce inequalities as
much as they ameliorate them. Educational justice says one hundred new Universities
of Phoenix is not the same as access to high-quality instruction for the maximum
number of willing students. And educational justice says that jobs programs that hire for
ability over “fit” must be linked to millions of new credentials, no matter what form they
take or how much they cost to obtain. Without that, some free college plans could
reinforce prestige divisions between different types of schools, leaving the most
vulnerable students no better off in the economy than they were before.

Free college plans are also limited by the reality that not everyone wants to go to
college. Some people want to work and do not want to go to college forever and ever—
for good reason. While the “opportunity costs” of spending four to six years earning a
degree instead of working used to be balanced out by the promise of a “good job” after
college, that rationale no longer holds, especially for poor students. Free-ninety-nine will
not change that.

I am clear about all of that . . . and yet I don’t care. I do not care if free college won’t
solve inequality. As an isolated policy, I know that it won’t. I don’t care that it will likely
only benefit the high achievers among the statistically unprivileged—those with above-
average test scores, know-how, or financial means compared to their cohort. Despite
these problems, today’s debate about free college tuition does something extremely
valuable. It reintroduces the concept of public good to higher education discourse—a
concept that fifty years of individuation, efficiency fetishes, and a rightward drift in
politics have nearly pummeled out of higher education altogether. We no longer have a
way to talk about public education as a collective good because even we defenders
have adopted the language of competition. President Obama justified his free
community college plan on the grounds that “Every American . . . should be able to earn
the skills and education necessary to compete and win in the twenty-first century
economy.” Meanwhile, for-profit boosters claim that their institutions allow “greater
access” to college for the public. But access to what kind of education? Those of us who
believe in viable, affordable higher ed need a different kind of language. You cannot
organize for what you cannot name.

Already, the debate about ifcollege should be free has forced us all to consider what
higher education is for. We’re dusting off old words like class and race and labor. We
are even casting about for new words like “precariat” and “generation debt.” The Debt
Collective is a prime example of this. The group of hundreds of students and graduates
of (mostly) for-profit colleges are doing the hard work of forming a class-based identity
around debt as opposed to work or income. The broader cultural conversation about
student debt, to which free college plans are a response, sets the stage for that kind of
work. The good of those conversations outweighs for me the limited democratization
potential of free college.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia

Commonwealth University and a contributing editor atDissent. Her book Lower Ed: How
For-Profit Colleges Deepen Inequality is forthcoming from the New Press.

This article is part of Dissent’sspecial issue of “Arguments on the Left.” Click to read
contending arguments from Matt Bruenig and Mike Konczal.

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This website and its content © Dissent Magazine 2018. All rights reserved.

Student debt is a crisis, for students and for graduates living with debt. There’s
near-universal bipartisan agreement that reform is desperately needed, but
almost as much disagreement about what, exactly, to do about it. On Monday,
Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the Democratic hopefuls vying for the White
House in 2020, released a comprehensive college-affordability plan that she
believes could fix a fundamentally flawed system of paying for college.
 In a Medium post, Warren criticized the government’s hands-off approach as
affordable access to America’s universities declined. “Rather than stepping in
to hold states accountable, or to pick up more of the tab and keep costs
reasonable, the federal government went with a third option: pushing families
that can’t afford to pay the outrageous costs of higher education towards
taking out loans,” she wrote in the post. To remedy this, she is calling for a
series of ambitious proposals, including the cancellation of student debt,
universal free public college, and greater support for minority and low-income
students. Of course, Warren is not the first politician to call for any of these
policies specifically, but the details of her plan separate her reform package
from the pack; she plans to pay for it with her “ultra-millionaire tax”—an
annual 2 percent tax on families with $50 million or more in wealth. Critics of
a wealth tax argue that it would be difficult to implement—accounting for
assets such as antiques or land poses considerable difficulties—and that it
would lead to more aggressive tax avoidance.
Watch: What does it mean to support ‘free college’?
Warren’s plan would cancel student debt up to $50,000 for borrowers who
make less than $100,000 a year. For every $3 a borrower earns yearly over
that $100,000, the amount of debt forgiven would decline by $1 . “So, for
example, a person with a household income of $130,000 gets $40,000 in
cancellation, while a person with household income of $160,000 gets $30,000
in cancellation,” she wrote. Those who earn more than $250,000 a year would
not be eligible for any debt cancellation, and the cancellation for borrowers
who do receive it would not be treated as taxable income.
Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage
Foundation, a conservative think tank, worries about the effects of a debt-
cancellation policy on tuition. “Universities will continue to do what they’ve
been able to do for decades, and that’s increase tuition, because they [will]
know there are policies like debt-cancellation and loan forgiveness,” she says.
“They enable universities to be as profligate as they always have been.”

BY ATTY. DODO DULAY

NOVEMBER 01, 2016

 HOME
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 FREE COLLEGE TUITION IS NOT REALLY FREE

Atty. Dodo Dulay

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” This famous adage

embodies the core economic principle that it is impossible for a man
to get something for nothing. No resource is free because no resource
is limitless.

If the government hands out cash to a so-called poor household, it’s

free for that household but it’s not free for everyone else – Filipino
taxpayers had to pay for that dole out. If a toothpaste company gives
out free samples, it’s free to those are lucky enough to get one but it’s
the consumer who ends up carrying the cost of that marketing
gimmick. Nothing is free.

If a person takes free vocational courses in TESDA, there’s the cost of

the lessons, which once again is shouldered by the taxpayers. It’s free,
but not really free. The taxpayers pay for it because it is supposed to
uplift our less fortunate countrymen and communities.

But some of our senators seem to ignore this No Free Lunch principle.
They seem to believe that the country’s money and educational
resources are limitless.

One of them, Senator Bam Aquino – chair of the committee on

education – authored the “Free Higher Education for All Act,” which
aims to provide free college education to Filipinos by having the
government fully subsidize the tuition at state universities and colleges
(SUCs).
Aquino’s bill is one of five other similar bills pending before the
Senate: Senator Francis Pangilinan’s Tuition Free Higher Education
Act of 2016, the Free Higher Education Act of Senator Sherwin
Gatchalian, Senator JV Ejercito’s Tuition-Free Higher Education Act
of 2016, One Family, One Graduate Act of Senator Sonny Angara,
and Senate Minority Leader Ralph Recto’s Free Public College
Tuition Act of 2016 – all of which propose to give free higher
education to Filipinos.

These proposals are definitely popular among many young Filipinos.

And with the youth constituting some 40 percent (or around 20
million) of the 52 million registered voters in the country, these
“tuition-free” bills – if passed – are a golden ticket to re-election.
Aquino, Pangilinan, Gatchalian, Ejercito, Angara and Recto are
clearly pandering to the youth vote – and populist sentiment.

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But free higher education at SUCs is essentially bad public policy.

The analysis “There Is No Such Thing as a Free College Education,”
written by Christopher Denhart of the Center for College Affordability
and Productivity (CCAP) – an education think tank in the US – and
published in Forbes magazine, explains why. Here are some excerpts:

“In a typical economic model for financing higher education, the

consumer (student) would pay for the goods that it consumes
(education) and the research that researchers do would lead to
innovations that have positive economic impact on society, therefore
paying for themselves.

“We have departed from this free market, “sustainable,” model

globally, and rely heavily on federal subsidies to keep universities
afloat…It is clear in the United States, with annual tuition fees in the
$40,000s or $50,000s and millionaire university presidents, that
federal subsidies have led to outrageous increases in university
spending, as universities, administrators, and faculty enjoy the benefits
of captured student loan and grant moneys.

“Sooner or later this ‘free’ higher education will feel less and less free
as increasing taxes will likely drive the most educated, highest
earning, most able [citizens] away from [their country] and into
societies where they can take home a greater percentage of their pay.

“Third-party payments [also] lead to many unintended negative

consequences…” The problem arises from the “moral hazard”
associated with not paying for services. Because students are not
sensitive to the costs associated with an additional year of higher
education they will consume more of it.

“Of the 60 percent of students who graduate from public schools in

the US, over half take longer than four years to graduate…If everyone
decided to take an extra year to graduate, because it was free, the
burden of higher education on the public coffers would increase by 33
percent…Graduation rates are already a problem in [tuition-free]
Germany, which is known for its “dauerstudenten” or “eternal
students.”

Another unintended negative consequence of this free tuition scheme

is that the influx of students will definitely strain the resources of our
SUCs. This increased enrolment has to be met with expanded
facilities, faculty and staff, which in turn, requires a higher level of
funding. Without adequate funding, the result is sub-standard
education and poorly educated graduates, defeating the laudable
objective of the tuition-free scheme, which is to provide higher
education for the most number of Filipinos.
But where would we get the money to fund the SUCs? Again, from
taxpayers like you and me, of course.

The free tuition scheme has already been tried by the State of
Louisiana in the US with disastrous consequences. In February this
year, Louisiana’s governor stopped the payment for its Taylor
Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS) program – the pseudo-
scholarship program that uses tax dollars to pay full tuition at any of
Louisiana’s public universities – because of the state’s massive budget
deficit. Louisiana simply ran out of money to subsidize its free college
education program.

The stoppage has left thousands of Louisiana students in the lurch,

with some 50,000 TOPS beneficiaries suddenly finding themselves
without a complete education and not enough means to get one.

As an American NGO summed up the paradox of this free-tuition

scheme: “Let’s remember, calling something free doesn’t make it free.
Nothing in life is free. It’s simply a matter of who pays the costs. Free
college tuition plans merely shift the costs of education from one
group of taxpayers to all taxpayers.”