Make University Tuition Free

College Education Should be Free for Everyone People everywhere in the U.S. are going into major debt just to get a college diploma so they can be eligible for a career in the job market. Fifty years ago, having to get into debt just to be eligible for a job was not a characteristic of starting a career. It is a new phenomenon that has developed as a result of the federal government backstopping all student loans (Avery, Turner).

Whenever the federal government gets involved in anything in the free market, prices go up (Wolfram). That is the reason health care is so expensive today: the federal government subsidizes treatments, which means producers have no problem raising the prices as they know taxpayers are going to pay for it via Uncle Sam. Since Uncle Sam also started guaranteeing student loans, colleges have no problem offering them to student and raising the prices while they are at it.

The job market is complicit because companies only want applicants who have a 4-year degree. So in order to be able to apply for the job one wants and have a reasonable chance of getting it, one has to have the degree—and to get the degree, one now has to be willing to go into a great deal of debt, for college is not cheap. But college should be cheap. It should be free in fact.

Heller claims that over the years federal student loans “have grown to the point that today they help millions of students each year to pay for college” (3), but that is simply not true. Those loans do not help students pay for college at all: they simply allow the student to write out the IOU to the college of their choice. The student is still responsible for paying every single penny back from his or her own paycheck.

And the big problem is that the big careers and big paychecks that the student was led to believe could be obtained following graduation from college just are not there to be had. So the student ends up on the hook for $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $100,000 in student loans as soon as he walks out the door of the college campus for the last time.

It does not matter if his degree in Music cannot help to get him a career anymore than a scratch-off lottery ticket from a gas station: that student has to pay that loan back starting right now. What help is there from the federal government in paying it back. Heller says these loans help millions to pay for college—but that is just outright misleading: they help millions of students go deep into debt to get a college education. That is all they do.

And when the college education fails to deliver on the promise of leading to a good, high-paying career, what happens to all that debt? It never goes away. The college grad working as a bartender at the local pub because it is the best paying job she can get is still responsible for that debt payment every month. The federal government is not sending her checks to cover the cost. The federal government says it did its part by guaranteeing the loan. Even that is disingenuous.

The federal government does not allow students to default on their student debt. It is not wiped out in bankruptcy court. It stays there like an albatross around one’s neck. Does this mean students should stop going to college since they cannot afford it? No. They are still going to need that degree because no student intends on being a barista forever. They did not go through all that work at the university just to be waiting tables.

They will continue to wait for the job market to turn around, for opportunities to open up. Waiting and paying down the debt, however, can be huge obstacles to moving forward. Students put off major steps forward—like getting married, or buying a home and settling down. So long as that albatross of debt is around their neck, they feel like they don’t have a right to be part of society the way others are.

In most cases, they couldn’t even take out a mortgage on a home if they wanted to. All the same, every time they go to apply for a job in a field they would like to have a career in, they need to show that they have that diploma: it is the only way they can get their foot in the door. Without that, they would be completely hopeless.

Yet, with the debt that goes along with getting the degree, it doesn’t seem to matter much, because they are barely able to muster any hope anyway. For that reason, Eskow points out that “the numbers show that barriers to higher education are an economic burden for both students and society” (1). Yet education is needed—badly; so much so, in fact, that the U.S. is falling behind other countries in terms of the extent to which its people are educated. The U.S.

should not be denying people the opportunity to go to college or hanging albatrosses of debt around the necks just for making the good attempt to get a degree. The U.S. should be helping them by making college free. What would it cost the state to make college free? Eskow puts the total estimate at $62.6 billion. That is about what Trump wants to spend on a wall between Mexico and the U.S. That is less than a tenth of what the U.S. spends on defense.

Take one-tenth of what the U.S. spends on defense and spend it on students so that they can have a brighter future at home. The Pentagon itself should go back to college to learn so accounting skills: after it, it has misplaced more than $20 trillion in the past two decades and has no way of saying where the money went (Kotlikoff). Yet our government cannot pay out $62.6 billion a year to help students go to school? Who is being conned here? The American people are being conned.

The opposing argument goes something like: Yes, but if the government made education free, everyone’s taxes would rise and ordinary people cannot afford to pay more taxes anymore than students can afford their student debt. That argument is based on the assumption that there is not enough money already floating around in the system. That is wrong. The government has plenty of taxpayer money—it just does not use it on taxpayers.

All that money goes to funding foreign wars—nation building overseas while the U.S. crumbles at home. All the federal government would have to do is focus on building one fewer nation abroad and focus on maintaining the nation it has right here in America. The money is there—so let’s pretend that it is not. So much of it is there, in fact, that no one even seems to bat an eye when the Pentagon’s audit shows trillions of dollars missing.

A mere $62.6 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the waste demonstrated out of the Pentagon. The other argument against free college for everyone is that if college is made free, the value and quality will go down. Oh, really? Why is that? The same teachers and schools will still be there. They are still getting paid—it is just taxpayers who are paying them.

They will collect their paychecks from the federal government and be federal employees (which means they’ll probably end up getting better benefits too). There is no reason in the world to believe that quality or value would go down if suddenly education was free to everyone as a public service. The quality and value would likely go up if anything because more people would be willing to get involved.

Currently people are wary of going to school to make something of themselves because they see so many others burdened by that albatross of debt around their necks. That albatross is what makes the value and quality of education suffer. That is the problem. Using taxpayer money currently being wasted by the Pentagon to straighten out a problem here at home would be a good step forward—not one backward. The arguments against free college for everyone are built on prejudices that stem from the well-I-paid-for-it-so-you-should-too crowd.

These people feel that just because they had to pay for education, everyone should be obliged to pay for it. Do they feel the same about health care? Would they object to free healthcare for everyone? Or how about social security? Before social security, people had to save for retirement on their own. Now, everyone pays into it. And everyone pays into a big fund today, too—only that fund is not being spent on.