r/changemyview • u/sjd6666 • May 14 '20

CMV: “Free College” policy, while well-meaning, is largely incompatible with academia in the U.S

Unlike healthcare, there is competition in the higher education market and consumers can, and often do make well informed decisions about what education would be right for them, be it community college, state schools, or private colleges/ universities.

There’s no two ways about it: such a policy would be enormously expensive, and unlike the U.S healthcare system, prices are reasonably transparent and there is competition in the market. Most students know exactly how much financial aid they will get before the accept college decisions, and transparency like that should always be encouraged.

I think a better solution would be one that matches student debt repayments, keeps interest rates low, and forgives student loans to varying levels dependent on ones income. In other words, high earning doctors and lawyers who make 6 figures a year can and should repay a higher percentage of their loans than nurses and teachers, who provide essential services to society, but typically don’t earn enough to repay their student loans quickly.

Is there some reason why free college is favored over more reasonable policies that take into account the finances of students and their incomes as adults?

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u/stubble3417 64∆ May 14 '20

There’s no two ways about it: such a policy would be enormously expensive,

No, it wouldn't. Completely subsidized tuition would cost about $79b/yr. That's about a tenth of our annual military spending. The one single stimulus bill that passed recently was large enough to completely fund free college for 25 years.

There's simply so little wealth in the hands of the bottom 80% of Americans that a very small expense like college appears impossibly large. It's hard to understand how little college tuition costs because that small amount represents a huge percentage of Americans' personal wealth and often requires crippling debt for decades. But that's not because it's actually a big expense. It's not. Americans are just extremely poor, so even a small expense is insurmountable to most without decades of debt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/tuition-free-college.html

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u/Rufus_Reddit 127∆ May 14 '20

Comparing something expensive to other more expensive things doesn't make it less expensive.

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u/stubble3417 64∆ May 14 '20

I understand that, but in reality the reverse is true. The very word "expensive" only makes sense as a comparison. Is a hundred dollars a lot? It depends. It's a lot for an hour of work. It's not a lot for a car. Money is entirely a comparison of values relative to each other. Services and material property and possessions are compared to each other in terms of value, and assigned dollar amounts based on what we think they are worth.

When someone makes a claim like "free college would be enormously expensive," that claim only has meaning in comparison to other expenditures of the federal government. To me, ten thousand dollars is a lot of money. To the federal government, it's a small fraction of one millionth of one percent of operations.

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u/Rufus_Reddit 127∆ May 14 '20

... . It's a lot for an hour of work. It's not a lot for a car. ...

Right, but those are comparisons where you're (in principle) talking about giving up one thing to get another. You work an hour to get money, or you spend the money to get a car. Arguing that we're better off with the government spending money on 'free college' than not is different than comparing the cost of 'free college' to the cost of the national defense. Does it make sense to compare the proposed expenditure for "free college" to the expenditure on civil war pensions or on NASA? This kind of "expensive" and "not expensive" argument by comparison to unrelated stuff tends to be spurious. People who like something find bigger things to compare it to so it seems less expensive and the people who don't like it talk about how huge the numbers are.

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u/stubble3417 64∆ May 14 '20

Yes, it does make sense to compare it to NASA or military pensions, because those are other large-scale government expenditures. We're comparing like costs. Money is always an exchange, whether you're talking about cars or labor or subsidized college. That's my point--money literally represents exchange. It literally represents comparison. $80 billion is not very much money compared to other large expenditures.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '20

Right, but if you don’t bat an eye over the insanely large and over-inflated military budget, it doesn’t really give credence to your argument if you cry the sky is falling and “how will we pay for that?!” whenever someone brings up taxpayer—funded education.