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…